OxMo-Vol.-3-No.-1

Oxford Monitor of Forced Migration Vol. 3, No. 1
Development in Burma Proper integrated lowland Burman society into a homogenised core.
This was evidenced by the rapid erosion of Mon identity, culture and language in Southern
Burma under direct British rule. In contrast, the Frontier Areas were indirectly administered
by the British in ways which ossified pre-colonial socio-political structures where power was
retained by chieftains and social participation confined to specific ethno-linguistic locales
(South 2008). Thant (2001) notes how old court notions of a mandala-periphery fused with
European linguistics to ensure that, as South (2008: 10) also concludes: ‘the separate
identities of Bama [Burman] and non-Burmans were reinforced by the colonial experience’.
Blood and God
The ossification of the Frontier Areas into heterogeneous ethno-linguistic blocs highlights the
ongoing significance of shared historical memory in the manufacture of ethno-nationalist
identity. The Frontier Areas during the colonial era would serve as incubators for a pan-
Karen identity constructed in opposition to the Burman core and, partially, by appeal to the
oral histories of the Karen people. Hill-tribes on the periphery of pre-colonial lowland
mandala centres of power had been marginalised and exploited: animist Karen song-poems,
hta, reference forced labour and massacre at the hands of Buddhist Burman overlords (Min
2000) and, earlier in history, violent expulsion from the Irrawaddy delta (San 1928). The
Frontier Areas’ isolation from Burma’s modernising, ‘cosmopolitan’ core certainly
contributed to the emergence of a shared history amongst the Karen. But it was the Burman
association of the Karen with both imperialism and Christianity that would see the reemergence
and reinforcing of the inter-ethnic tensions precipitating Karen displacement.
After 1828, the growth of Christianity amongst a fraction of S’Gaw Karen contributed to the
perception that the Karen as a whole were committed to the destruction of Buddhist-Burman
civilisation. In reality, various Karen sub-groups had previously engaged in both anticolonialist
and pro-British armed struggle (South 2008). Upon complete annexation in 1886,
the British actively recruited Burma’s ethnic minorities into its armies. In 1925, they adopted
an exclusively non-Burman recruitment policy in which Karen were particularly favoured; by
1937 they made up 25% of the Burma Military Police, half of the Burma Rifles and
outnumbered Burmans three to one in the British India Army. This bolstered Burman
perceptions of Karen as colonial proxies, particularly when, as in the Saya San rebellion of
1930 to 1931, Karen troops were used to crush Burman resistance.
For Burma, colonial rule was traumatic. Upon completion of the British conquest in 1885, the
political and cultural nexus of the Burman people, Mandalay Palace, was desecrated and their
conceptual system - based largely on the harmony between religious and political authority
underlying Buddhist cosmology - was shattered (Gravers 1999). Further erasure of the
Brahmanic political culture met fierce and popular resistance leading to two years of British
counter-insurgency (Thant 2001). Burmans viewed Christianity as a pernicious
fundamentalism determined to uproot the cosmological and ontological foundations of a
dhamma ordered universe. Elements of religious war emerged as Christian Karen were pitted
against Buddhist Burman during colonisation (Gravers 1993). This recurred during WWII
under respective British and Japanese alliances. Many disenfranchised S’gaw Karen,
meanwhile, perceived the British as liberators. Positive relations with the Empire were
lubricated by a growing number of American Baptist Karen elites who established the Karen
National Association: which was the precursor of the KNU. Thus, from the outset, a brand of
Christianity was critical in the establishment of an ethno-nationalist, modern sense of ‘pan-
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