“Buddhism Has Been Insulted, Take Immediate Steps”: Anti-Indian Nationalism in Colonial Burma and the Origins of Burmese Islamophobia, 1930–39

On August 27th, 2018, the U.N. fact-finding mission dispatched to study the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar recommended that the International Criminal Court investigate the Myanmar military for genocide and crimes against humanity. Scholars examining the deeper roots of Burmese Islamophobia agree that it began in the colonial period. Due to the large Indian diaspora in colonial Burma, scholars have established that anti-immigrant prejudice was a powerful tool for Burmese nationalists, but they have not explained why Burmese nationalists specifically targeted Muslims from the late 1930s onward. My paper argues that Islamophobia first emerged in colonial Burma in the late 1930s as the result of Burmese nationalists using Indian Muslims as a scapegoat for political and economic issues caused by British and Indian capitalist elites. While left-wing Burmese nationalists used Communist slogans and tactics to undermine the power of British and Indian capitalists, right-wing Burmese nationalists depicted Islam as the enemy of Burmese Buddhism and as equivalent to “Indianness.” By conflating the categories of Indian, colonizer, and Muslim, these nationalists inflamed hatred against Indian-Muslims, Indian-Hindus, and even Burmese-Muslims, such as the Rohingya, culminating in anti-Muslim riots in 1938. These under-examined riots provide my key case study, demonstrating how Burmese nationalists solidified the racialization of Muslims as Indian invaders. This argument has significant implications both for the history of the Indian diaspora in Myanmar and for the wider Indian Ocean world. First, it shows how British and Indian colonial elites used “divide and rule” scapegoating of a religious minority for the issues caused by the business class. Second, more broadly, it reshapes the way historians have viewed colonialism in the Indian Ocean world by differentiating between an elite Indian business class that acted as colonizers with the British and the impoverished majority of working-class Indians that were targeted by nationalist violence.