BURMESE PEOPLE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 April 1942, Page 4

BURMESE PEOPLE

HAPPY INDOLENCE LATENT PHYSICAL POWER. POSITION OF WOMEN. The Burman, who has shown some disposition to aid the invading Japanese, is described by Mr V. C. Scott O’Connor in “The Silken East,” an absorbing pen picture of Burma and its peoples. “Physically,” he says, “the Burman is for his size a fine fellow; short, well made, broad-chested, stout-limbed and muscular. A ‘weedy’ Burman, outside the small percentage of the large towns and the sedentary occupations, is rare. The boatman, the cartman, the peasant, the artificer, is nearly always a strong man, capable when put to it of great effort. Living as he does in a tropical climate, abjuring meat from religious scruples, branded as incorrigibly lazy by all his critics, he is yet, as a rule, a man in fine training, full of momentum and vivacity.” TOIL AND IDLENESS. The author explains that much of the laziness of the Burman is that of a man whose being is permeated with a philosophic contempt for the accumulation of material things, with _ a generous desire to bestow in charity and in good works all that is over and above his needs.

“Put him on the river he loves, with a swift and angry current against him and he is capable of superb effort,” he writes. “Turn his beautiful craft, enriched with exquisite carvings, downstream, with the wind and tide in his favour, and he will lie all day in the sun and exult in the Nirvana of complete idleness.” Mr O’Connor, who did not foresee the land of Burma becoming a battleground, imagined that the competition of life would in time develop the toughness of the race, increase its power of resistance and enable it to maintain its own ascendancy.

STATUS OF WOMEN. Referring to the Burmese women, he points out that the country is in advance of more reputedly civilised countries in the status it accords its women. “The infant marriages and shutting up in walled houses, the polygamy, the harems, the social punishment of widows, the denial of spiritual rights, which prevail in the neighbouring continent of India, are unknown in Burma,” he says. “Here women marry when they are of age and after they have seen somewhat of the world; they marry, for the most part, whomsoever they will and for love. They are not, save in exceptional cases, handed over as chattels to a man whom they know not, but are courted and won. The Married Woman’s Property Act has in effect been established for centuries in Burma. In this country, where the women earn so much, the woman’s earnings are her own. “Divorce is easily obtained, but seldom asked for. The lightness of the marriage laws, the readiness of the Burmese women to enter into an easy alliance, shock the virtue of the strenuous foreigner, but within her ideals she is a perfectly proper, modest and well-mannered woman. She is of the world to her fnger-tips, and at theatres and elsewhere her appreciation of the sallies of the factors is of an Elizabethan frankness; yet her conduct there is beyond reproach.” In Burma there are other district racial groups or the remnants of them —the Mun, the Chin, the Shan, the Karen and the Katchin —all originating in the north as did the Burmese, who are the dominant people.