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The Journal of Burma Studies Vol. 15 No, 2 (2011), pp. 26382

2011 Center for Burma Studies Northern Illinois University

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Narratives of Nation, Questions of Community: Examining Burmese Sources without the Lens of Nation
Alicia Turner
The history of anti-colonial nationalist movements of the 1920s has become almost mythic in the Burmese imaginary. Its stories are retold as pivotal events that changed Burmese politics, sentiment and identity in radical ways. Yet nationalist discourse, whether in the forms of heroic retellings of this movement or the discourse of that time that sought to rally Burmese people to the nationalist cause, necessarily obscures the diversity of human identity. As Ernest Renan has argued, nationalist discourse in its eorts to cultivate feelings of connection, a sense of us that can be united against an outside colonial enemy, requires that one forget or silence any divergence.1 As much as scholars know that Burmese identity was never singular or completely unied, we still allow the mirage of a unied singular nation to quietly seep into the assumptions that frame our research. As Prasenjit Duara has argued, the nation has become the subject of history.2 It shapes our disciplines and our orientations, as we write for and about Burma studies. A focused look at one moment in Burmese history, one document and even one person, however, reveals that even when the effort to produce a feeling of unity was at its
1 Ernest Renan, What Is a Nation? in Nation and Narration, trans. Martin Thom, ed. Homi K. Bhaba (London: Routledge, 1990), 822.

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peak, Burmese sense of themselves and their worldviews were inherently multiple. Diverse and hybrid modes of Burmese identity thrived even in the heart of the anti-colonial nationalist movement, and it was this multiplicity that made the response to colonialism possible. My approach in this article is to oer a micro history of a single moment in the rise of the anti-colonial nationalist movement.3 Examining one short moment and one document oers the luxury to focus in closely and be more attuned to the diversity of voices apparent even when the appeal of constructing a unifying identity was at its height. I have chosen to examine the Ninth All-Burma Conference of Burmese Associations, the General Council of Burmese Associations (GCBA) conference held in Mandalay on October 21, 1921, the meeting minutes published to document that event and the biography of one individual, U Kyaw Yan, who was central to the conference that year.4 Focusing on a moment where the need for a united front was greatest and the eorts to produce it most explicit will expose the inherent multiplicity of Burmese worldview and identity at the micro level and help to make us, as scholars, more attuned to its impact in Burmese history in broader terms. In this, I oer a simple and perhaps obvious point: that when we return to the primary sources, we nd that history and the lives, motivations, and interactions of those we study are never as simple as the stories we tell about them. The primary sources reveal identities and ideals that are intrinsically multiple; that history is inherently messy.

2 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 3 Carlo Ginzburg, John Tedeschi, and Anne C. Tedeschi, Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It, Critical Inquiry 20, 1 (1993): 1035. 4 Myanm pya lum chuinra nawama myk aca awe ky (Mandalay: Myanmar Newspaper Press, 1921). Hereafter: 9th All Burma Conference Minutes. I would like to thank Bobo Lasin for bringing this fascinating document to my attention.

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Within any one set of events or documents, there are not just diverse contributing inuences, but multiple possible trajectories and interpretations among the participants.

The Appearance of a Unied and Unifying Voice

The Ninth All-Burma conference was preceded by the rise of nationalist discourse as a force in Burmese public life. The British had been a colonial presence for almost a century but it was only after the fall of the Burmese monarchy in 1885 and the subsequent increasing colonial interventions that the majority of Burmese felt the impact of colonialism in their daily lives. The major public responses had been twofold: insurgency against colonial power in the immediate aftermath of 1885 and a movement to preserve Buddhism and the Buddhas ssana under changing cultural conditions in the three decades leading up to 1920.5 In the 1910s, some in these movements began to articulate their ideals in terms of nation and by 1921, the nationalist movement, by all accounts, had come into its own. Over the previous two years, the nationalists had won three important victories, each of which set the stage for this conference and its later minutes in important ways. First, the GCBAs predecessor, the Young Mens Buddhist Association (YMBA) had confronted authority on the shoe issue from 1916 to 1919. They had resisted the colonial state on the issue of Europeans wearing shoes at pagodas and won a clear victory for local autonomy. In this debate, Burmese leaders asserted that Buddhist monuments must be respected in the same manner by all, regardless of their nationality. They forced the colonial government to acknowledge the autonomy of pagoda trustees in religious matters and were able to enforce a rule that Europeans must remove their

5 Ni Ni Myint, Burmas Struggle Against British Imperialism, 18851895 (Rangoon: Universities Press, 1983).

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shoes on pagodas.6 It was both a symbolic victory, bringing the Europeans and Burmese onto the same level, at least on the pagoda platform, and a political victory in exploiting British laws on religious non-interference to create space for Burmese autonomy. This victory had been newly won by the 1921 conference and the enthusiasm of those organized for the cause had not subsided. Second, the university students were coming to the end of the Rangoon University strike that argued for greater access to higher education of behalf of the Burmese and had created a system of national education independent from the governments education department. The spirit of reform and political engagement was in the air. In December of 1920, Burmese students from colleges and high schools throughout the province had launched a boycott of the government education system to protest the Rangoon University Act.7 The creation of a university in Burma had been long awaited; Burmese civic leaders and colonial ocials had been calling for a university in Rangoon since the early 1880s.8 Generations of Burmas best students had been forced to travel to Calcutta or London for their education. When the creation of a university was nally announced, students were outraged to nd elements in its founding documents that continued to promote Burmese exclusion and subordination. The student boycott was massive in its impact; by the governments estimate, almost twelve thousand primary and secondary students participated at its height.9 The strike
6 Wearing Shoes in Pagodas, 1919, Series 1/15(D), Accession 1330, File 2P-45, Myanmar National Archives, Yangon, Myanmar. 7 Maung Hla Sein, The Voice of Young Burma: The Reproductions of the Articles Published by the Publicity Bureau of the University Boycotters (Rangoon: New Burma Press, 1922). 8 Taw Sein Ko, Rambler pseud., Education in Burma: From a Native Point of View, Our Monthly: A Magazine of General Literature 2, 5 (1883): 1679; Justice Jardine, University for Burma at Rangoon, Asiatic Quarterly Review 7, 13 (1894): 7175. 9 Aye Kyaw, The Voice of Young Burma, Southeast Asia Program series (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1993), 33.

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fostered a system of national schools as an alternative to the boycotted government schools; a sophisticated system of national education that proved to many that the Burmese need not be reliant on the colonial state to achieve their goals.10 More than this, the strike and the national school movement were one of the rst mechanisms of building direct connections between Burmese subjects across the colonial province. It became a place where the message of a single national identity was articulated and disseminated. The third and nal victory of the nationalists by October of 1921 was the victory of the more politically-oriented younger faction of the YMBA over the more conservative and Buddhist-focused older faction. At the end of 1918, a younger faction split with the older members over Burmas exclusion from the Montagu-Chemsford reforms toward greater self-rule for India and the much weaker Craddock scheme oered in its place.11 The younger faction sought more direct political confrontation. By the March 1920 general convention, they had won the dominant voice and reorganized as the General Council of Burmese Associations (GCBA) with explicit goals of greater national sovereignty. The younger, more politically inclined group transformed the YMBA (Young Mens Buddhist Association) into the GCBA (General Council of Burmese Associations), a political body that no longer needed to concern itself with social and religious projects, but would directly address issues of separation from India and the political autonomy of the nation. This was from all accounts of Burmese twentiethcentury history, a political body, focused on the nation as the prime form of identity and its sovereignty as their ultimate purpose and one that claimed the right to speak on behalf
10 Amyotha ne hnin amyotha pyinna ye luptha myo thamein akyin (Yangon: Sapa Biman, 1970). 11 C. P. Khin Maung., Buddhabathatha myanmar athin mya e at t uppati sa tan (Mandalay: Commercial Press, 1920); C. G. Stewart, The Burma Political Tree: Special Condential Supplement, The Burma Police Abstract of Intelligence 36, 37 (1932): 19.

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of the nation with a single voice. This 1921 conference was only the second for the explicitly nationalist GCBA and the rst in which each of all of these historical elements came together to help articulate a single national identity.

The Published Conference Minutes: Identity in Chorus or Cacophony?

The minutes of the Ninth All-Burma Conference open with a long invocation of the virtues of the Buddha. This is certainly not surprising; Buddhism had long been intertwined with political power and identity. This invocation before the GCBA conference was a ritual necessity that invoked Buddhist values as a standard way of opening any large gathering. However, this was a particularly important moment for this group, gathered for political purposes, to signal the consonance of their purpose with Buddhist ideals. The abrupt shift from the YMBA to the GCBA the year before and the Rangoon University strike that had rocked the country that year came after two decades of Burmese organizing on behalf of the Buddhist ssana, that is the Buddhas dispensation and religion.12 This text needed to introduce those who had been active for two decades to the goals of the new nationalist movement. The opening invocation had to appeal to those for whom the amyo of the famous nationalist slogan, amyo, batha, thathana, was a new term. This group had to be convinced that the idea of nation deserved to be intimately tied to the ssana, which had been their collective purpose for so long. The opening invocation works its vision of nation into the religious frame of ssana. After the opening paragraph extolling the virtues of the Buddha, it announces the meeting of the GCBA the concrete political event that was to be the subject of the text. However, this paragraph presents

12 Alicia Turner, Buddhism, Colonialism and the Boundaries of Religion: Theravada Buddhism in Burma 18851920 (PhD diss., The University of Chicago, 2009).

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this event as occurring not in any sovereign territory or colonized jurisdiction, but on Jampudipa, Rose Apple Island the continent in Buddhist cosmology where Buddhas are born to teach the Dhamma to humanity. Thus, while the larger issue may be the political pursuits of this newly triumphant nationalist organization, the authors staged it inside the recognizable Buddhist cosmos as the broader site of meaning. Similarly when the audience is addressed directly on the third page, they are oered a means to recognize their new nationalist identity in close proximity to the Buddhist projects they have been carrying out for the past twenty years. The bodies of constituents for the conference, and by extension the audience reading the minutes, are addressed as the patrons and supporters of the Buddhas ssana, who are then glossed as the Myanmar people, nationals.13 The audience is told very clearly that they are the body of the nation, amyotha, and the same ones who had made the prosperity of the ssana possible. With these connections made, the GCBA ocials were ready to head into the business of the nationalist political task at hand, condent in the knowledge that their members were empowered to perceive the nationalist and Buddhist projects as synonymous. Standard histories of early twentieth-century Burma tend to portray this period as a watershed in which the collective consciousness turned to the eorts of nationalism, a single moment when imperial imposition became so overwhelming that people turned to nationalism as the only response.14 But, of course, groups of people do not change their thinking so

13 9th All Burma Conference Minutes, 3. 14 See for example: Maung Maung Pye, Burma in the Crucible (Rangoon: Khittaya Publishing House, 1952); John F. Cady, A History of Modern Burma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958); Donald Eugene Smith, Religion and Politics in Burma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965); Edward Michael Mendelson, Sangha and State in Burma: A Study of Monastic Sectarianism and Leadership, ed. John P. Ferguson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975).

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abruptly. The meeting minutes reveal that the membership was not as unied in its interests and goals as the leadership might have sought to portray. Whatever the debates that had gone on in 1920 over the involvement of the YMBA in politics, this was not a body that was of a single mind. As the name makes explicit, it was a federation of associations. At the time of this 1921 GCBA conference, those organizations operating under the mantle of the YMBA were only a slim majority. There were 238 branch YMBA associations at this time and seventy-ve Young Womens Buddhist Association branches.15 The rest, 226 associations, were various independent local organizations that joined together only for the annual meeting.16 These were organized on local terms that may or may not have corresponded to the politics of the top national leaders. The meeting minutes record discussions of Home Rule and political reforms, but these were not the only, nor perhaps the dominant themes debated. Members also raised religious and cultural issues including support for the Patamabyan Pali examinations, the economic support of the national schools, whether to allow soldiers and police to wear shoes on the Shwedagon pagoda and support for the Buddhist pilgrimage site of Bodhgaya in India. There were discussions of the role of representatives on municipal councils juxtaposed with questions of supporting the explicitly nationalist monk U Ottama. More mundane issues, such as the administration of the trains and the need to teach English were discussed. Some members brought forward a feminist agenda, asking for a comparison of the number and support for womens associations versus mens associations.17 This was not a single-issue body, nor one that could agree on or promote a single vision of identity or collective purpose. It was a place where a number of visions came together to be debated and

15 9th All Burma Conference Minutes, 75. 16 Ibid., 26. 17 Ibid., 41.

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worked out. And while later nationalist retellings may have benetted from presenting this as a unied body with a unity of purpose, that was a narrative that could only be oered in retrospect by a victorious faction of the leadership. In the thick of it, it was much more complicated. One need only peruse the names of the organizations that participated in the conference to see that there were clearly multiple trajectories and identities involved. In addition to the branches of the YMBA, there were some associations whose titles signaled the issue of nationality as primary, such as the Moulmein Myanmar Yuwa Association (Myanmar Youth Association) and the Yangon Myanmarhita Mainma Athin (Myanmar Womens Association), but even these signaled an interest in various subcategories of identity, based on age or gender. There were other associations represented that emphasized ethnicity as a primary mode of identity, for example the Yangon Rakhine Association. The most common associations however are those that made reference to Buddhism or the Buddhas ssana: the Mandalay Buddhabatha Thathana Pyu Athin (Mandalay Society for Promoting Buddhism), the Moulmein Thathana Thughima Maka Athin, the Mandalay Thamaggathahaya Athin, the Mandalay Gurudhammayeikkhita Athin and the Rangoon Sunday Buddhist Union. These are organizations whose historical existence tends to only be recorded in their participation in the larger movements. But they are part of hundreds of associations that had been formed over the previous decade to promote Buddhism and prevent the decline of the Buddhist ssana in decadent and changing times. These organizations began to appear during the last years of the nineteenth century to respond to the perceived need to stem the decline of Buddhism precipitated by British colonialism. 18 This concern created waves of Buddhist publishing, preaching and organizing, and led Buddhist

18 Turner, Buddhism, Colonialism and the Boundaries of Religion.

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lay people in towns across Burma to found hundreds of associations. Through these associations, they carried out programs for educational, moral and religious reform with the idea that a renewed enthusiasm and devotion among Buddhists could counter the erosion of the Buddhas ssana. The idea that responsibility for the ssana fell to the laity after the fall of the monarchy constructed Burmese Buddhists as a new collective, uniting geographically and socially disparate Burmese in a common endeavor. However, it is important to note that the issues of ssana and nation were not the only approaches represented at the conference. Ethnicity and gender were other points of identity and connection that were explored. Regional identity was also being asserted, as each association always prefaced its name with its city of origin; those from Bassein asserting their dierence from those from Pegu, etc. Moreover, we would be wrong to think of this diversity of identity and approach as only representing a diversity of constituents. The further one goes into the primary documents of this period, the more it becomes clear that each of the actors themselves held diverse understandings of their own identity and multiple sets of goals and trajectories. Even the staunchest nationalists among them seemed to be of two minds (or perhaps more than two) about their larger purpose and destiny.

U Kyaw Yan: A Man of Multiplicities

The conference minutes also announced a demonstration of nationalist defiance against colonial sovereignty. The last ten pages of the document are dedicated to heralding that U Kyaw Yan, a celebrated educator and activist from Mandalay, was taking the ultimate act of rejecting colonial political authority returning the honors bestowed on him by the colonial government and the ATM (Ahmudan gaung Tazeik ya Min) status with its gold medal.19 This was a Medal for Good Service recognizing those Burmese who
19 9th All Burma Conference Minutes, 5768.

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had performed admirably as servants of the colonial state. Recipients boasted the letters ATM after their names, and those with this honor were usually quick to gain status and prominence in the Burmese community. Rejecting such an award was previously unheard of, given that there were only ve hundred of these medals awarded by the colonial state during the whole of its 63-year rule in Burma, the recipients up to this point had been very proud of the status.20 It seems appropriate that as the nationalist cause was coming to assert itself in opposition to colonial rule, U Kyaw Yan would publicly reject a title and honor that could mark him as a collaborator. U Kyaw Yan had been awarded the ATM medal in 1910 after twenty-seven years of service for the Department of Public Instruction, rst as a government school teacher and later as an inspector and administrator. These positions had not only taught him how to operate within the colonial system, but they had moved him around the province in various positions, letting him establish a reputation within the larger Burmese community. It was through his positions with the colonial education department that he created the schools and associations that would establish him as both one of the most prominent gentlemen in Mandalay and as an emerging nationalist. Thus the return of the medal and, soon after, all of the other titles and honors given him by the colonial state, was a momentous event, signaling a radical break with his personal past and a symbolic break for the growing nationalist movement.21 The meeting minutes reprint his letter to colonial authorities and a speech he gave on the occasion. The minutes also attach a biography of U Kyaw Yan, listing his accomplishments and work on behalf of the nation. It is not surprising given the context that the biography tells the narrative of the rise of a good colonial civil servant and his
20 Roper Lethbridge, The Golden Book of India (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1900), xii. 21 9th All Burma Conference Minutes, 6263.

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transformation into a good nationalist. It charts his education, quick to point out his training under a local village abbot before his entrance into government normal school in 1882 and his subsequent career as a teacher and educational administrator, listing his postings in an array of towns and cities across Burma, culminating in his posting in Mandalay where he became central to the movements that precipitated the founding of the GCBA. We know from other sources that he had been central to the colonial states programs, negotiating on behalf of the education department for greater government involvement in monastery education in 1911.22 His biography as published in the GCBA minutes served as a localized version of the narrative that the GCBA was seeking to tell about itself and the nation with nationalist ideals emerging triumphant out of a long history of engagement with the colonial government. However, this is not the only story this biography tells. U Kyaw Yans story is a case in point about multiple identities among Burmese at the time. This biography equally presents an image of U Kyaw Yan as activist and organizer, the center of almost all of the work on behalf of Buddhism in Mandalay since the 1890s. In 1897, as a deputy inspector of schools in Myingyan, he founded the Buddhabatha Nuggaha school, one of the earliest Buddhist English-language schools and the Buddhabatha Kalyana Thingaha Buddhist association. When he was transferred to Mandalay soon after, the people of Myingyan protested the loss. U Kyaw Yan went on to found the Mandalay Society for Promoting Buddhism (Buddhabatha Thathana Pyu Athin) and a string of Buddhist Anglo-Vernacular schools based o the model of Myingyan.23

22 Taw Sein Ko, Minutes of a Meeting Held on the 13th August 1911 in the Thathanabaings Monastery to Discuss the Question of Primary Education in Monastic Schools, in Burmese Sketches, ed. Taw Sein Ko (Rangoon: British Burma Press, 1913). 23 Myingyan, The Times of Burma, July 29, 1899; Wanted: Two Teachers for the Anglo Vernacular School, Myingyan, The Times of Burma, October 7, 1903; A Sympathizer, Myingyan, Burma Echo, February 29, 1908.

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His work in this area was much broader than just Burma: he was a local representative of the Maha Bodhi Society in 1899 and a delegate to the third annual convention of the International Buddhist Society in Rangoon in 1905.24 He was a sponsor for the rst Buddhist mission to England and by 1917 was listed as one of the Vice Presidents of the Buddhist Association of Great Britain and Ireland.25 With the Mandalay Society for Promoting Buddhism, he hosted Viceroy Lord Curzon in December of 1901 and held a reception for the Shan Saophas who made generous donations to the Society.26 The 1921 GCBA biography recounts many of these accomplishments and adds his association with the YMBA and trips on its behalf to Bodhgaya, as well as being a pagoda trustee and founding a formal school for Buddhist monks. The image of civil servant, nationalist, and Buddhist organizer are not at odds in this narrative of his life, but they do open up the concept of identity more broadly than the celebration of a nationalist returning colonial honors might suggest. They point to multiple loci of identity embedded even within a single person and a single set of events. There are hints in the biography of U Kyaw Yan as a much broader and complex character as well. The GCBA biography notes that he was highly educated and published a bi-monthly journal, references that hint another of his personas: scholar and publisher. U Kyaw Yan founded a press at the Society for Promoting Buddhism and used it to publish tracts on an astounding array of topics, in which he held expertise. It is as an author of tracts that U Kyaw Yan is best known to later librarians, historians, and the booksellers.
24 Representatives of the Maha Bodhi Society, Journal of the Maha-Bodhi Society 7, 9 (1899): iii. 25 Ananda Metteyya, Account of the Third Annual Convention of the International Buddhist Society, Held on the 29th October, 1905, vol. 7, Publications of the Buddhasasana Samagama (Rangoon: Hanthawaddy Press, 1905 [2449]). 26 The Decadence of Heathenism, Baptist Missionary Magazine 82, 8(1902): 57273.

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The diversity of tracts and books he wrote is staggering. The list of his works demonstrates an even more complex set of identities and affiliations. He was an expert in Burmese language and literature; in 1912, he published a compendium of 1143 Myanmar proverbs and a Treatise on Archaic Words that is still in circulation.27 He was respected as well for his knowledge of Burmese calendrics, publishing lists for calculating calendars.28 He also wrote a number of tracts to promote Buddhist ethics and practice among his contemporaries; these included a 1901 Handbook on Buddhist Precepts, a 1903 tract entitled One Hundred and Eight Things to Remember, a 1904 tract on the Observation of the Full Moon Day of Kason, a 1914 tract on The Buddhist Beatitudes, a 1915 tract On Diligence.29 In addition, he recorded the events of the institutions he founded; publishing the Rules of the Kalyanathingaha Society, Myingyan in 1897 and a History of the Buddha Thathana Noggaha High School in 1915. And his background with the Department of Public Instruction translated into a tract, On Education, in 1915.30 One tract he wrote bringing together a focus on education and the promotion of Buddhist morality provides a clearer image of his ability to work in multiple modes. This tract

27 Kyaw Yan, Mulapaurana dipani kyan (Mandalay: S. P. B. Press, 1912); Kyaw Yan, U Kyaw Yan myanma sak pon kyan (Mandalay: S. P. B. Press, 1912). 28 Kyaw Yan, Lahtarak nan akatwak pum (Mandalay: S. P. B. Press, 1906). He is cited as an authority on the topic in A. M. B. Irwin, The Burmese and Arakanese Calendars (Rangoon: Hanthawaddy Printing Works, 1909), 25. 29 Many of these tracts have been lost, but record remains of his publishing career in the Catalogue of Books and Pamphlets Published in Burma (Rangoon: Superintendent Government Printing) that was compiled on a quarterly basis. I take the transliteration and English translations of the Burmese titles from the catalogue. Kyaw Yan, Thila Adeikbe Letswe [Handbook on Buddhist precepts] (Mandalay: Irrawaddy Press, 1901); Kyaw Yan, Hmatkyi tayashitlon [One hundred and eight things to remember] (Mandalay: Indian Press, 1903). 30 All of these appeared in the Catalogue of Books and Pamphlets Published in Burma.

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admonished young people not to drink alcohol, a behavior that many Buddhist reformers of the day identified as evidence of the decadent colonial condition.31 The tract is split in two sections. The rst, detailing the reasons to abstain according to Buddhist literature, demonstrates U Kyaw Yans training in Buddhist ethics and texts. The second section, in contrast, compiles the arguments against alcohol from the literature of Western medical doctors; oering an equally compelling case to young students who were being trained to think in Western scientic terms at the same time as they preserved their Buddhist heritage.32 Here we begin to see the complexity of colonial lives opened up. Not only did U Kyaw Yan need to be uent in Buddhist philosophy and Burmese ethics, he had to train himself to think and work in Western scientic and rationalist systems. The ability to move between the two systems with such ease was the product of his diverse engagements in changing times. In the text, he demonstrates an amazing ability to move seamlessly between very dierent and colliding cosmological visions one that bases its authority on its disenchanted view of the world, the other driven by larger invisible forces of moral action and karma and populated with a range of supernatural beings and forces. It was his ability to think simultaneously in multiple systems: Buddhist, scientic, nationalist, etc., each making a claim to both universal knowledge and ultimate purpose that stands out in reading his work. U Kyaw Yans interest in Western medicine combined not just his Buddhist activism, but yet another set of interests and identities that come out in later biographies. A biography written after his death presents U Kyaw Yan as one of the most prominent men in Mandalay for more than fty years but his religious and political work is almost a footnote

31 Kyaw Yan, Thura meraya thakathani kyan, 2nd ed. (Mandalay: S. P. B. Press, 1917). 32 U Kyaw Yans knowledge of Western medicine was not limited to this context; he also published a dictionary of medical terms.

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in this text. He is instead remembered as a committed practitioner of indigenous medicine.33 The text recounts that not only was he well known and respected in this eld (he published two tracts on this as well), but he created a successful business selling indigenous medicines, a line of which he patented. He is credited with being instrumental in organizing the preservation of indigenous medicine and its knowledge, but he also appears as a businessman, one that provided for his family even after death. Finally, this biography hints at yet another side to U Kyaw Yan, indicating that he, like many others spent their fortune on alchemy.34 The interest in alchemy is not surprising, but it, combined with the tracts he published on astrology, points to another set of orienting worldviews and interests that made up his complex identity. A knowledge of astrology, alchemy, calendrics and traditional medicine demonstrated the extent to which U Kyaw Yan was able to adhere to the Burmese image of paa shin, an educated authority that had served as the ideal under the monarchy. An expertise in these various lokiya knowledges as well as Buddhist texts was expected of those who rose to prominence. However, with the advent of colonial rule and the increasing inuence of Western technologies and cultures, the diversity of knowledges and worldviews required of leaders increased exponentially. U Kyaw Yan had to master both the body of Burmese arts and Western sciences that the court advisors of the late Konbaung period worked to comprehend.35 But, more than this, his decades imbedded in the colonial administration meant that he had to be able to not just translate between cultures, but to actively operate

33 S. Chatterjee, Meeting the Personalities: Burma Series (Rangoon: Rasika Rajani Press, 1956), 58. 34 Ibid. 35 Michael Charney, Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burmas Last Dynasty (Ann Arbor: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, 2006), chap. 7.

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with uency inside multiple worldviews and trajectories. Like Taw Sein Ko, his contemporary who served as a translator and bridge between multiple cultures, the colonial condition required that U Kyaw Yan cultivate and negotiate multiple identities within himself.36 Putting all of these sources together, it becomes clear that U Kyaw Yan was without a doubt a renaissance man, like many of this era. He balanced a wide variety of divergent identities inside himself. We get a complex and contradictory picture of the man: an ardent nationalist who is at the same time a dedicated civil servant; a key organizer of the Buddhist Revival in its modernizing mode and a practitioner of alchemy and astrology; an extensive knowledge of Western medical science that combined with a respected career in traditional medicine; a scholar educated in multiple colonial and local knowledge systems and a businessman. Seeing these combinations in one man should serve to remind us to question our assumptions about what appear to be opposing viewpoints. They emphasize that multiple loci of identity and modes of being were not just possible, but necessary in the colonial world.

Conclusion
This is not to say that U Kyaw Yan was any less a nationalist, but to say that he, like the constituents of this GCBA conference, were balancing a number of dierent goals and claims to their ultimate purpose. There were multiple modes of identity and belonging operating in Burma during this time. There was certainly some who were coming to think in the terms of nation as the primary mode of identity, that is to think of Burma as a unique body of people united by history, culture and language with an inherent destiny of

36 Penny Edwards, Relocating the Interlocutor: Taw Sein Ko (18641930) and the Itinerancy of Knowledge in British Burma, South East Asia Research 12, 3 (2004): 277335.

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political sovereignty. However, this group as it sought to bring others to its cause was forced to reckon with many other modes of understanding ones connection with others aliations of region, ethnicity, local identity shaped by village or delity to a certain monastic leader or school. Moreover, the worldview that gave primacy to the nation as an entity in human history had to leave space for worldviews that enchanted Burmese space with Buddhist cosmological, astrological, alchemical and supernatural forces. Moreover, it was not simply that anti-colonial nationalism had to contend with these multiplicities, but it was these diverse forces that made the nationalist movement possible. Despite a rhetoric that sought to minimize and erase dierences of gender, ethnicity, region and make projects of Buddhist or supernatural ultimate purpose subordinate to the purpose of the nation, anti-colonial nationalism was made possible by a colonial context that necessitated identities that were multiple, composite and hybrid. The colonial encounter itself required Burmese to see themselves in multiple modes and develop an ability to operate inside multiple value systems. In this context, a nationalist movement required bringing together divergent associations, interests, values and worldviews. For as much as the nation may seek to make claims to unity, it was the diversity of purpose in the group and the individuals that made these claims possible.
I would like to thank Bo Bo Lasin, Alexey Kirichenko, Catherine Raymond, Michelle Hubert, Tom Patton, Liz Denius, and the anonymous reviewers for their assistance and comments on this article. Alicia Turner is an assistant professor of humanities and religious studies at York University in Toronto. She specializes in the study of Buddhism in Southeast Asia with an emphasis on the period of British colonialism in Burma/Myanmar. Her research focuses on the intersections of religion, colonialism and nationalism. Her work on Buddhist lay movements in Burma from 1890 to 1920, studies issues of education, the performance of respect and campaigns for moral reform. In addition, she is engaged in a collaborative project studying the biography of U Dhammaloka, a working-class Irish sailor who ordained as a Buddhist monk at the turn of the twentieth century and became a popular Buddhist propagandist and anti-colonial agitator with a career spanning across South and Southeast Asia. She can be reached at turnera@yorku.ca.

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Bibliography Newspapers and Archival Sources

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