Since their emergence beginning in the 1980s, landmark studies of intimate relations between European men and colonised women have made gender and sexuality legitimate subjects of study within the history of empire. Far from being private matters of little public concern, intimate relationships became matters of political consequence. The fraught debates that arose around these relationships and the children of mixed race who were the product of them reshaped the nature of colonial rule, hardening the boundaries between coloniser and colonised. Yet Europeans were not the only incomers to colonised societies. High levels of mobility from other parts of Asia to Southeast Asia in the same era of high imperialism resulted in far more numerous intimate relationships between local women and migrant Asian men and, in some contexts, gave rise to similar social and political anxieties and crises. Chie Ikeya is among those scholars who have been prompted to examine how inter-Asian relationships became matters of state and society. In InterAsian Intimacies she sets out to examine how marriages of Burmese women to (Asian) foreigners became the subject of imperial and national interdiction and communal violence.
Ikeya uses the detailed life histories of close family friends whose forebears hail from Asia and beyond, including Persian, Dutch, Indian and Armenian antecedents. Despite their mixed background, which Ikeya suggests is by no means unusual in Burma, they think of themselves as undeniably Burmese. The personal histories of this extended family are interwoven with stories of intermarriage drawn from court cases and elsewhere to illustrate the life choices of women in mixed relationships. In tandem with the individual life stories, Ikeya presents the broader fate of inter-Asian relationships in Burma, from pre-colonial accommodations under the Konbaung kings through political, legal and social obstacles put in the way under British rule and during the wartime Japanese occupation.
InterAsian Intimacies challenges stereotypes of passive or cunning ‘native wives’ with life histories that show women of her adoptive family who were agents in their own right, aiming to further their children’s education, engage in business ventures or make independent choices about religious conversion. From the pages of court records come other Burmese women in mixed relationships who may have been equally assertive in defending their rights but were placed in a legal bind by colonial legislation. Burmese customary practice recognised publicly acknowledged cohabitation as a legal marital bond, and Burmese Buddhist law was favourable to women’s ownership of property. In some circumstances partners were able to amicably agree that their unions were bound by such practices, but when disputes arose they were seldom judged in the women’s favour. This was because colonial law upheld a long-standing stipulation that indigenous personal laws were to be respected. Yet in doing so it gave precedence to male rights. A Burmese women’s marriage to an Asian man was only legally recognised if it was enacted according to his personal laws. It meant that a Burmese woman was required to convert, on paper at least, to her husbands’ religion; her offspring were obliged to assume their father’s nationality; and she lost out in any dispute over inheritance, as Hindu or Muslim Buddhist laws were less favourable to women’s ownership.
By the 1920s the ‘problem of intermarriage’ had become a political cause among nationalist campaigners. They began to police mixed marriages, seeking to outlaw them not just in the name of preserving the legal rights of Burmese women, but to safeguard the purity of the race and the Buddhist religion, and strengthen the nation. Organised opposition to intermarriage justified exclusion and provoked violence, most seriously in the anti-Indian riots of 1938. Ikeya traces how the customary social and legal position of Burmese Buddhist women was aggrandised and idealised, feeding and forming a notion that persists today, that the only true Burmese are Burmese Buddhists.
During the Japanese wartime occupation of Burma, Ikeya contends in the final two chapters, mixed unions remained a locus of socio-political concern and regulation. Burma experienced some temporary respite from anti-Indian sentiment, and related objections to Indo-Burman couplings when they were urged to unite against European colonial aggression under the Japanese imperial banner of ‘Asia for Asians’ and accept Japan’s alliance with the Indian nationalist Chandra Bose and his base in Burma. Japan’s reputation for brutal violence under occupation is offset in these pages by stories of peaceful coexistence and cooperation with a less violent class of Japanese occupier, as well as memories of romantic intimacy put forward by Japanese in wartime Burma to justify encounters that were perhaps less consensual than they were prepared to admit.
Detailed accounts of the lives of Auntie Rosie and Uncle Mohan and their forebears make for fascinating reading, and the book presents the personal and political stakes for women forming intimate partnerships with foreign men over a generous sweep of Burma’s colonial history. There are nevertheless some limitations. I would like to have seen a firmer analytic framework, one that carefully considers the points at which the urges of colonialists, nationalists and occupiers to control interracial relationships overlap. As it is, Ikeya rebuffs any effort to make comparisons between nationalists’ approach to inter-Asian relationships in Burma and colonial states’ reaction to the partnering of European men with local women. She does so on the grounds that the latter constitutes a Eurocentric hegemonic paradigm. Given that the research on gender and sexuality in colonial history is so recent, and hardly overbearing, this stance seems rather misplaced. There is substantive evidence through the chapters to show that the anxieties of all these state or state-like actors were not dissimilar, but the threads are left hanging rather than pulled together into a final analysis. Nor do the family histories clearly illustrate the kinds of controls, restrictions and discriminatory practices being placed on inter-Asian relationships that Ikeya otherwise describes. The subjects of her interviews live for the most part happy and settled lives which do not appear to have been disrupted by nationalist attempts to regulate their relationships. The only objections we see to the choice of marriage partners comes from within the family and it is mild and soon overcome. It is unclear whether this picture is a product of Ikeya’s wish to avoid negative representations, or a function of the family’s relatively high social standing. A broader range of experiences of women across a wider socio-economic spectrum would have been helpful here.
These concerns aside, InterAsian Intimacies makes an important contribution, by advancing our understanding of how national projects have sought to control women and their sexuality in order to create powerful and persistent notions of belonging. This book will be of interest to those concerned with issues of gender, sexuality and the state and to scholars of Burma and southeast Asia more widely.
