Armed Rural Folkwere afraid of retribution, they bought up the brick kilns in the area
and used them as bulwarks around rural settlement defences. Rival
rural folk then attempted to ally with rebels to destroy the brothers
before the defence works were completed. The brothers foiled the at-
tempt and then attacked the settlement of their rivals. The scale of the
fighting was quite large although not technically large enough to meet
the “Correlates of War” Project’s threshold of one thousand battle-
related deaths to constitute a war separate from the overall Pacification
Campaign.^30 The largest local, rural engagement in this period that
the present author has seen referred to in the documents is one that
included a force of seven hundred Burmese who lost two hundred dead
in the encounter.^31
Although small-scale, rural fighting was certainly very violent and
bloody. One can easily imagine a heritage of violent conflicts between
rural settlements in competition for water, trade, or other resources.
One of the main features of the ways in which Burmese in this region
waged war locally was the taking of heads. When hostilities broke out,
engagements with the Burmese led to Burmese taking the heads of
Indian troops and white officers.^32 In response, the Indian troops began
taking dacoit heads. Although we do not hear much about it now, it was a
major issue at the time in both Burma and Britain. Rudyard Kipling even
published a poem, “The Grave of the Hundred Dead”, about one Indian
company that chased down Burmese “dacoits” and took a hundred heads
for a comrade’s head that had been taken.^33 But there were numerous
other stories, both fictional and non-fictional and led to the issue being
raised several times in the British Parliament. Although orders were
given in 1888 banning the Indian Army from taking anymore Burmese
heads, the practice reared up from time to time; it would mainly seem
out of frustration at the Burmese continuing to engage in the practice
themselves against their comrades. This is interesting because there are
- Joel David Singer & Paul Francis Diehl, Measuring the Correlates of War (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990): 196. - James Alfred Colbeck, “Mandalay in 1885–1888: The Letters of James Alfred
Colbeck, Originally Selected and Edited by George H. Colbeck in 1892,
Continued”, SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research 2.1 (Spring, 2004): 66. - Ibid., 53.
- Rudyard Kipling, The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling, introduced by R. T. Jones
(Ware: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1994): 59.