Law, Disorder and the Colonial State

Corruption in Burma c.1900

J. Saha

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137306999
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In this original study British rule in Burma is examined through quotidian acts of corruption. Saha outlines a novel way to study the colonial state as it was experienced in everyday life, revealing a complex world of state practices where legality and illegality were inseparable: the informal world upon which formal colonial power rested.

1

Making Misconduct

“[B]ut I think I shall fine him. Yes, it is not improbable that I shall fine him.”

“And do you imagine that that will do any good?”

“It will do my pocket good to the extent of a rupee or two, provided of course, I do not remit later.”

“But him, I mean—do you suppose that it will do him the least good? I doubt it myself very much.”

“It will furnish him with further data for his misdemeanour tariff; that is about all.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“He will get from the fine a rough idea of how much it will cost him to repeat an experiment of this kind. Next time he will count up and calculate. If he is not quite sure that the fun is worth the fine, he will deny himself.”

Cecil C. Lowis, The Machinations of the Myo-Ok (1903)

Constructing an economy of discipline

Defining ‘corruption’ is notoriously difficult. Various authors with different disciplinary backgrounds have pointed out that the term has often been used to denigrate post-colonial regimes, depicting corruption as something that belongs to non-Western ‘others’.¹ The sentiments of a recent commentator on corruption in Burma reveal how casually such essentialising moral judgements are made: ‘Burma is one of those countries where corruption is well known to the point of being conspicuous. … To Western eyes the flagrancy still comes as a shock.’² The recent scandals of Enron in the United States as well as those concerning BAE Systems, parliamentary expenses, and the phone-hacking journalists at News International in the United Kingdom have somewhat muddied the waters of such patronising sentiments, but they persist.

Unsurprisingly, such a moralistic notion of corruption has an imperial lineage.³ Herbert Thirkell White, the Lieutenant Governor of Burma between 1905 and 1910, wrote in his published memoirs, extolling the virtues of colonial rule, that, ‘To all men were given the protection of equal laws and the assurance of even handed justice. The grasping avarice of officials was restrained, and corrupt practices were discountenanced.’⁴ In a similar vein, Charles Crosthwaite, the Chief Commissioner during the ‘pacification’ campaign in Upper Burma, used the apparent corruption of King Thebaw’s reign as a justification for colonial invasion.⁵ British officials denigrated the pre-colonial state as utterly and irredeemably corrupt. At the same time, the absence of corruption was dubiously heralded as a marker of the beneficence of the colonial regime.

This portrayal of corruption has lasted into post-colonial historical writing. Apologists for empire have argued that the British introduced the ideals of an incorruptible state, if not its realisation.⁶ D. G. E. Hall identified the Burmese corrupt treatment of two British sea captains as a critical causal factor in the First Anglo-Burmese War.⁷ Like Crosthwaite before him, for Hall British imperialism was made inevitable, even invited, by the corruption of the pre-colonial Burmese state. These arguments have insidiously managed to find their way into more nuanced and critical recent histories of colonial rule in Burma. Even Robert Taylor, perhaps in parapraxis, described corruption under the colonial regime as a return to ‘practices of the past’.⁸ The abatement of corruption has been made a marker of modernity, one allegedly brought about by colonialism.

British officials consigned corruption to the pre-colonial past, and historians of Burma have by and large followed suit. That corruption was widespread in the branches of the colonial state did not disrupt this rhetorical strategy. It was viewed as an unfortunate inherited trait of states in Asia, stubborn ‘practices of the past’. Later in his memoirs, White opined: ‘Both in Upper Burma and in Lower Burma we inherited the traditions of a feeble Oriental Government, and it was impossible that evil practices should not abound.’⁹ Corruption was conceived of as a problem particular to governing an Oriental population. Thus, the British largely blamed their subordinate Indian and Burmese officials for corruption, and the suggestion that corruption could be a product of the colonial bureaucracy was not countenanced.¹⁰

But corruption was a product of colonial rule: British officials discursively created corruption. This process was similar to the development of colonial discourses on criminality. Both corruption and criminality were defined as illicit through colonial disciplinary techniques and institutions.¹¹ Historians of colonial Asia have long studied the various ways that criminality was constructed through colonial policing, prisons, and courts in conjunction with discourses on race, gender, and psychology, among others.¹² This creation of colonial criminality was paralleled by the colonial construction of corruption through similar, though more informal, quasi-judicial practices put in place during the late nineteenth century. Corruption too developed alongside discourses of racial difference, particularly the perennial concern over the mendacity of the Burmese and Indian populations.¹³ Despite the regular instances of corruption committed by Europeans in Burma, Asians were routinely depicted as inherently prone to corruption. Corruption was primarily about disciplining ‘native’ subordinate officials, just as criminality was about disciplining ‘native’ populations.¹⁴

The term ‘corruption’ is, however, slightly anachronistic. In their official bureaucratic correspondence, the British did not use the term to describe the malpractices in the subordinate branches of the state. It was an adjective applied to the pre-colonial state and was regularly used in the British colonial press in Burma for polemical purposes, but it was not the official nomenclature. British officials instead preferred the broader, euphemistic term ‘misconduct’. Unlike corruption, misconduct encompassed acts of incompetence, negligence, and insubordination within its remit, although most of the recorded cases involved the types of wilful malfeasant malpractices now synonymous with the term ‘bureaucratic corruption’. In official imperial rhetoric, the pre-colonial state suffered from endemic Oriental corruption, whereas the colonial state was afflicted by subordinate misconduct.

Although misconduct was the target of bureaucratic discipline, it was not the intention of British officials to eradicate what were pervasive malpractices. In fact, the misconduct proceedings that were put in place were based implicitly on tolerance as much as punishment. They constituted an economy of discipline in which both acquiesce and repression were common currencies.¹⁵ Acts of misconduct were differentiated from one another; a repertoire of punishments was developed and calibrated to the different categories of misconduct; the severity of punishment was calculated according to a range of contingent colonial imperatives: in short, during the late nineteenth century, British officials developed what the novelist and colonial judge, Cecil C. Lowis, referred to as a ‘misdemeanour tariff’. Intrinsically, within this economy of discipline, spaces were produced in which some misconduct was tolerated, overlooked, or punished leniently.¹⁶ In other words, inherent to the misdemeanour tariff was the possibility that the fun could be worth the fine.

This chapter reveals the dual processes through which colonial rule made misconduct. Firstly, how misconduct was created as a colonial illegality. In other words, the process by which certain malpractices were defined as misconduct through the quasi-judicial proceedings put in place during the nineteenth century. Secondly, how these proceedings created spaces in which misconduct was tolerated, particularly when committed by township officers and Europeans. The final section then places these colony-wide processes in the local dynamics of the rapidly changing Irrawaddy Delta society and economy.

The arithmetic of punishment

Despite the gradual evolution of formal procedures for investigating and punishing misconduct during the nineteenth century, policing corruption was a peripheral concern throughout colonial rule. There was no specialised unit for enforcing bureaucratic conduct. There was no India-wide legislative basis for dealing with misconduct that was not already punishable under the Indian penal code. It was not a topic that featured in the official correspondence between the members of the upper echelons of the Raj.¹⁷ Instead, misconduct proceedings were developed through a series of local standing orders issued by the chief commissioners of Burma (after 1897, the lieutenant governors). The proceedings that were eventually put in place locally were thin and were not uniformly adhered to. Nonetheless, they loosely constituted modern disciplinary techniques specifically targeting misconduct.

Before 1879, disciplining a subordinate official was an informal procedure. Deputy commissioners could dismiss them without framing formal charges, without giving them the opportunity to defend themselves, and without giving them the right to appeal decisions. It was decided in 1879 that, except in cases in which a subordinate had been found guilty of a crime and dismissed as a result of being jailed, officials being disciplined for misconduct must have the charges put to them in writing and then given the opportunity of defending themselves through a written explanation.¹⁸ These written explanations were not simply window-dressing to give legitimacy to deputy commissioners’ decisions in cases of misconduct. They were an effective form of defence, and subordinate officials were occasionally able to exonerate themselves through their written explanations.¹⁹

From this rather rudimentary, bare bones framework, a more intricate set of procedures developed that were increasingly of a quasi-judicial nature. In 1893, subordinate officials were given the right to appeal against decisions in misconduct cases. But at the same time, the Chief Commissioner ordered that witnesses questioned during misconduct investigations should not be placed under oath and that advocates should not be used. The rationale behind this was to maintain a lower threshold for admissible evidence in misconduct proceedings than was necessary for the criminal courts.²⁰ Although the proceedings were increasingly legalistic in their framework, they were clearly delineated from actual legal proceedings.

By 1901, the documents that subordinate officials were allowed to access in order to frame their appeals were clarified for the first time. In addition to the charges, the defence, and the decision, subordinate officials were entitled to access the recorded statements of witnesses examined in the enquiry. This was tantamount to being able to cross-examine the evidence. However, again this was limited as they were denied access to any internal office notes, reports, or correspondence regarding the enquiry.²¹ Formal proceedings for punishing misconduct cases while being subordinated to judicial proceedings took on many of the same features, such as the use of witness and the right to appeal decisions.

However, it would be misleading to extrapolate from these written orders to directly infer how misconduct investigations were actually conducted. In 1898, it was necessary for the Lieutenant Governor to reinforce the earlier orders that the charges, the defence, and the decision should be reduced to writing and given to the accused official. In 1907, deputy commissioners had to be reminded of the orders again by the Lieutenant Governor of Burma, even though they had first been formulated in 1879. British officials would occasionally punish and dismiss subordinate officials without going through the established procedure, especially with regard to granting appeals.²² Evidently, deputy commissioners in Burma often misconducted misconduct proceedings.

A further difficulty deputy commissioners faced when punishing misconduct was that it was not always clear what precisely constituted misconduct. The Indian penal code covered most malpractices, for example, bribery, accepting illegal gratifications, and extortion.²³ If the evidence of these illicit acts was not strong enough for a criminal prosecution, as was often the case, deputy commissioners instead pursued suspected subordinate officials through misconduct proceedings. At the other end of the spectrum, misconduct also encompassed negligence and general incompetence. Being either incapable or inefficient in their duties would occasionally lead to subordinate officials being disciplined through misconduct proceedings.²⁴

But not all forms of misconduct were covered by the penal code or by negligence; indeed, there was some internal debate over whether some acts constituted misconduct at all. Two such unclear areas were: whether subordinate officials should be allowed to engage in private trade, and whether they should be allowed to gather donations from those attending their family ceremonies.²⁵ Both of these questions proved divisive within the Indian Civil Service in Burma. At the heart of these bureaucratic debates was an attempt to delineate the public and private spheres. British officials worried that if subordinate officials were allowed to engage in private trade, then they might be tempted to use their public office to illicitly further their businesses.²⁶ British officials also worried that if subordinate officials were allowed to collect donations for private ceremonies, then they might be tempted to use these donations as a guise for extorting bribes.²⁷ On the other hand, it was feared that barring subordinate officials from private trade or accepting donations for ceremonies would be an unfair restriction on their private lives.²⁸ It was in situations such as these, in which the public and private spheres overlapped, that misconduct charges were often brought against subordinate officials.²⁹

Although the correspondence surrounding these two issues was often heated, both were ultimately of little consequence. Despite deciding that subordinate officials should be prohibited from engaging in private trade, the only official from the Irrawaddy Division charged with breaking the rule between 1896 and 1909 was not punished but praised for exhibiting commercial enterprise against the allegedly innate inclinations of the Burmese.³⁰ Likewise, the only official found to have breached the regulations on accepting donations for hosting private ceremonies was punished lightly with a transfer to a new township and retraining.³¹ Although, in principle, British officialdom wished to clearly separate the public and private spheres, in practice, they were ambivalent about policing and punishing instances when the two overlapped but there was no evidence of malfeasance. In these cases, they showed leniency. There was a sliding scale of punishment.

Within the formal proceedings for investigating acts encompassed by misconduct, deputy commissioners had a broad repertoire of potential punishments at their disposal. Dismissal was the most severe punishment that could be sanction...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Making Misconduct
• 2 The Career of Inspector Pakiri
• 3 Whiter than White
• 4 The Male State
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index