Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiahad fought against the Burmese court, too, and local princes who had
been indirectly ruled before the war and who now would not submit to
direct British rule. There were also denizens of the court and pretender
princes, as well as garrison commanders from the royal army and their
men who had not yet surrendered. But the local Burmese sources also
make clear that the fighters were made up of entire rural settlements and
the fighting was often between one settlement and another.
The best example comes from one of the local family histories men-
tioned earlier. At some time close to the events, Maung Tha Aung, the
youngest brother of Sitke Maung Tun E, wrote a history of the fighting
during this period in Upper Burma in Burmese which, not surprisingly,
related detailed events about areas close to where he lived and thus
focused on the districts around the Toungoo–Mandalay Extension.^29
Taking the bulk of the illustrations in The Graphic and The Illustrated
London News at face value, one would believe that most fighting occurred
between British and Indian troops on one side, and Burmese dacoits on
the other. Burmese were the perpetrators or the victims but they were
not the heroes of the conflict. By contrast, in Maung Tha Aung’s text,
the reader is shown a different war, one in which the British were rarely
directly involved and in which the Burmese themselves did the fight-
ing, often settlement against settlement. But from Maung Tha Aung’s
account, we also learn a great deal about how Burmese rural folk were
armed, how they fought, and with whom they fought.
Here we find none of the references to the Sanskrit martial paradigms
found and described in the chronicle accounts. The fighting between
villagers was as far from the kind of warfare depicted in the chronicles
as is possible. Maung Tha Aung is especially detailed about the fighting
and the tactics used by his brother, the sitke Maung Tun E. The author
was a participant in these events and assisted in commanding rural war-
riors in battles with other rural warriors. In these battles, the brothers
divided their warriors into two groups, always keeping one within their
settlement’s defences and another in a line outside it, or sometimes the
second group would be sent out through the back to attack the enemy
from the rear. When the brothers won their battles they beheaded the
dead leaders and sent the heads off to the British. When the brothers
- Maung Tha Aung & Maung Mya Din, “The Pacification of Burma: A Vernacular
History ”, Journal of the Burma Research Society 31.2 (1941): 80–137.