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Colonial secularism built in brick: Religion in Rangoon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2021

Alicia Turner
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Abstract

This article examines colonial secularism in Burma through a history of the built environment of Rangoon. The creation of the colonial city in the 1850s as an ordered grid of ethnic neighbourhoods and established religions served as a pedagogy of the secular, teaching its population to internalise religious difference. And yet, against this secular vision in brick and pavement there were exceptional spaces that enacted alternative visions. The Thayettaw monastic complex began as home for the diverse displaced ethnic monasteries of the pre-colonial town, but it soon defied the boundaries of colonial rule. Its practice of Buddhism became a mechanism for mobility, interaction, and interconnection.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 26 - 48
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Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore, 2021

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Thomas Borchert, Anne Hansen, Alexey Kirichenko, Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière, Maung Maung Thein, Michael Edwards, Ruth Streicher, Wai Phyo Maung and the anonymous reviewers of this journal. Research for this article was supported by funding from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies.

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42 Religious processions and festivals, of course, continued to spill out onto the streets in colonial Rangoon, but as the archives of the colonial administration attest, these caused both consternation and intense regulation by the state. ‘Riots between Mohammedans and Hindus in Rangoon’, 25 July 1893, India Office Records Public and Judicial Department, IOR/L/PJ/6/354, File 1532, British Library.

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