Armed Rural Folkwere the embankments and bridges and so on, and local obstacles, such
as hostile elements among the indigenous population, were included
in the reporting. The second kind of sources were the actual military
reports themselves, but the most immediate of this category of reports
were those written by the men actually involved in the engagements
and who were often lower ranking officers with less time in the military.
While they were also subject to the influence of institutional imagina-
tion, their reports on the actual targets of armed indigenous bands give
some indication of what the hostiles were after, such as the railway line.
The third kind of sources consists of the artistic renderings of Burmese
rural folk at war, some of which are included in the following section
of the present chapter. Certainly, chronicles were subject to the control
of the royal court and, with larger political designs in mind, would not
typically try to portray anything related to the rural folk. Nevertheless,
artistic representations in the newspapers of the time often attempted
to portray Burmese rural folk in illustrations. Although very few of such
illustrations depicted such rural folk as warriors, those that do deserve
our attention as an especially important category of source material. The
fourth kind of sources are local family histories from about that time
and there appear to be many of them, but only a few have been used in
Western historiography. This is largely because as local texts they gener-
ally are viewed as being largely irrelevant to the more general national
story. The fifth kind of source material is the photograph album. There
are many photograph albums on Burma from this period in museums
and libraries, as well as in private collections. Many contain photographs
that were not staged by official army photographers. Instead, they were
on-the-spot photographs often taken by British soldiers themselves. The
birth of amateur photography occurred in the middle of the campaign:
every officer able to carry a camera had one with him into the field,
due to the introduction of the cheap Kodak hand camera with roll-film
(1888).^28
Reconstructing Local, Rural WarfareLocal indigenous sources indicate that forces fighting the British ran
the whole range of characters. There were bona fide brigands who
- Boris Mollo, The British Army from Old Army Photographs (London: National
Army Museum 1975): iii.