Armed Rural Folkon 1 January 1886. That was not the end of the story. The British Indian
Army soon found itself in the middle of a war against Burmans and smaller
ethnic groups that went on for years, although the main fighting in low-
land Burma was over with by 1889 or 1890. This conflict pinned down
tens of thousands of troops and the fighting spread into Lower Burma as
well. Aside from the Sudan, it is the major colonial war of note between
the Zulu wars and the Boer War and sketches from it filled the pages of
The Graphic and The Illustrated London News on a regular basis.
Understanding why rural folk fought against the British is not as easy
a task as it may at first appear. The rise of nationalism in Southeast Asia
from the late nineteenth century in the Philippines and the post-World
War I period in much of the rest of Southeast Asia had made the pros-
pects of colonial rule a natural enemy to indigenous populations, but
these sentiments should not be read too far back in time. In fact, many
of those who opposed British rule had also opposed the royal court
and were indeed resistant to centralizing political agencies rather than
demonstrating any awareness of national or proto-national loyalties. As
Parimal Ghosh lamented in his Brave Men of the Hills: Resistance and
Rebellion in Burma, 1825–1932, “we do not know the exact mechanism
in operation to get the common people of Burma” to rebel and that there
“had always been a hiatus between the locality and the centre”.^19
The area of eastern central Burma where the British were building the
Toungoo to Mandalay Extension of the railway from the beginning of
the Third Anglo–Burmese War offers a good example of what triggered
Burman rural folk to take up arms after that war concluded after three
weeks in late November 1885. The colonial administration in British
Burma to the south wanted a railway built so that they could jump start
the economy and foster the growth of trade between Rangoon and
China. The military backed the plan because the line could be used to
bring troops and supplies to Mandalay faster. No unusual problems were
envisaged. So, within a year of the outbreak of the campaign, 250,000
Burmese were taken out of rural settlements and put to work building a
railway under the most horrendous conditions. The Toungoo–Mandalay
Extension took two years and five months to build. Construction began
in September 1886, opened to Pyinmana in May 1888, Yamethin in
- Parimal Ghosh, Brave Men of the Hills: Resistance and Rebellion in Burma, 1825–
1932 (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2000): 22.