Chie Ikeya’s InterAsian intimacies across race, religion and colonialism focuses on inter-Asian marriage in colonial Burma. Ikeya argues that over time these marriages became “the subject of political agitation, legislative activism and collective violence”.
Colonial Burma was an attractive destination for migrants, traders, professionals from all over Asia and the Middle East. The economy was booming and Rangoon was one of the world’s popular destinations for immigrants. Most of this migration was male, due to costs associated with travel, plus restrictive colonial labor and employment policies. As a result, marriages between different religious and ethnic backgrounds were common. After such marriages, the wife would often then convert to her husband’s religion. However by the 19th century, increasingly women, both single and married were traveling to Asia, thus reducing the need for inter-marriage. Stigma and prejudice directed at mixed communities erupted.
The book uses archival English, Burmese and Japanese sources to talk about why inter-marriage and conversion became not a matter of households but of great political, imperial and national interest, a crisis that required intervention. These inter-Asian marriages soon became triggers for a series of legal reforms and campaigns aimed to stifle women’s conjugal and reproductive choices. Mixed marriages were discouraged, and they became “flashpoints for far-reaching legislative reforms and Buddhist revivalists, feminist and nationalist campaigns.”
Inter-Asian marriages also provided the colonial government with legal complications, as when Hindu and Islamic law differed from Buddhist law. For example, in 1906 a woman called Shwe Me was sued by her Hindu Husband Doramoswami, claiming that, as she wasn’t Hindu, she wasn’t his legal wife. Although they had lived together for over 16 years and had six children, he won the case as she was Buddhist, not Hindu, and thus he legally denied her rights to his property.
It wasn’t just colonial powers who sought to limit these unions, sections of local Burmese society were highly involved in campaigning against them. This solidified during the early days of the Burmese independence movement, and intertwined nationalism and independence with increasing prejudice against marriages between Burmese women and foreigners. Burmese women who married non-Burmese men were seen as traitors who “had betrayed her own religion, race and nation”. This concern became so large, it was a contributing factor behind the 1937 separation of Burma from India, the separation would limit migrants to Burma from India, and thus reduce the number of marriages between Indian men and Burmese women.
While much of the book focuses on the colonial period, Ikeya highlights how this is still an issue today. Much of the hatred against the Rohingya, which culminated in the genocide of 2017, was focused around bogus claims of love jihad, a conspiracy that alleged Rohingya and other Muslim groups forcibly convert women to Islam through rape and duplicitous marriage. Such claims, Ikeya argues
is only the most recent iteration of this alarmist imagination of the Burmese Buddhist as an exceptional community perennially imperialised by degenerate foreigners.
Chie Ikeya has to a great extent drawn upon the family history of Rosie Hnin Yee and Pondicherry Mohanarajan, close family friends of the author’s family, and a family mixed of Muslim, Christian, Arab and Indian ancestry. Ikeya uses this family to portray the impact of being of mixed background on their lives. The book includes stories from their lives and the lives of their parents and grandparents. Ikeya argues that this focus on the personal has much to
teach historians about the ingenious ways that people have confronted shifting bodies of knowledge, relationships of power and terms of social existence to sustain intimacies many find unthinkable.
There is extensive archival research and supporting documentation to back up her findings, including data from colonial British, Burmese and Japanese archives. Ikeya provides large amounts of highly interesting and thought-provoking data as well as individual experiences. The blending of the academic and personal makes for a moving account and the book provides useful insights into nationalism, belonging and identity in colonial Burma.
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