The Bible, The Bottle And The Knife: Religion as a Mode of Resisting Colonialism for U Dhammaloka

Abstract

While those who sought solidarity between Asians and Europeans in the colonial era often ended up replicating the colonial divisions they had hoped to overcome, the interstitial position of working class and beachcomber Buddhist monks allowed for more substantive modes of solidarity and critique. U Dhammaloka offered a sophisticated critique of British colonialism in its religious, cultural and material modes, but opted to focus his efforts on Buddhism as an avenue of resistance because it offered him a means of connection, like that which Leela Gandhi has identified as a ‘politics of friendship.’

Acknowledgements

This paper was originally presented at the conference Southeast Asia as a Crossroads for Buddhist Exchange: Pioneer European Buddhists and Asian Buddhist Networks 1860–1960 hosted by the Study of Religions Department of University College Cork, Ireland, September 13–15, 2012 and funded by the Dhammakaya International Society of the United Kingdom as part of the 2012 postdoctoral fellowship ‘Continuities and Transitions in Early Modern Thai Buddhism’. I would like to thank Brian Bocking and Laurence Cox, my collaborators on the Dhammaloka project, for their ongoing support and suggestions on this article and Kate Crosby for her wise editorial eye.

Notes

1. U Dhammaloka's biography is the subject on an ongoing collaborative research project between Laurence Cox, Brian Bocking and myself. For a preliminary outline of his life see Bocking (2010), Cox (2010), Turner (2010), Turner, Cox, and Bocking (2010).

2. ‘The Ordination of an Englishman as a Monk with the Name of Dhammaloka’ (in Burmese) (1900) The Hanthawaddy Weekly Review, July 14.

3. European Buddhist's Case (1911) Times of India, February 1.

4. Dhammaloka's substitution of the Gatling gun was particularly apt in the context because it referenced the unequal military encounters between European and Asian forces.

5. International Order of Good Templars (1907) Burma Echo, September 21.

6. See, for example, in Burma (Swift 2003). On broader issues of the International Order of Good Templars and racial divisions see Fahey (1996).