“A New and a Better Cunning”: British Wartime Planning for Post-War Burma, 1942–43

Extract

The framing of British policy towards India in the twentieth century sought to reconcile its prime importance in the dependent empire with its political aspirations through some kind of evolution towards the status afforded the settler dominions. Though British policy towards other dependencies was rarely co-ordinated — even so far as concerned a region like “Further India” — it was influenced by their relationship with India. India in a sense defined the limits of those policies: they must not go so far as to undermine the British position in India by untoward example; nor, on the other hand, must they make so little advance as to alienate the Indians and inhibit the availability of Indian forces. For Burma the inter-relationship was particularly close. Burma had been acquired from India, partly in order to protect British commerce based in India, but mainly to provide for the security of British India. It had been administered from India. Indian commerce, Indian labour, Indian moneylending had as a result established new ties. But India also influenced the reshaping of the constitutional as well as the administrative structure. Working both within and outside those structures, Burman nationalism was itself influenced by developments in India, though directing its criticism at Indian, even more, perhaps, than at British economic exploitation. The Burman nationalists insisted that the constitutional advance of Burma must at least keep pace with that of India.