Adulteration of pure native blood by aliens? mixed race kapya in colonial and post-Colonial Myanmar

ABSTRACT

Colonization may be viewed not only as loss of sovereignty and territory but also of ‘purity’ of a native race to an alien power. After the British colonized Burma in the late nineteenth century, they brought in Chinese and Indians to the sparsely populated colony as labour for new administrative and economic activities. Intermarriage, mainly between native Burmese women and men of alien races – British, European, Chinese and Indian – was thus inevitable. Mixed-race peoples – kapya in Burmese – were then born out of these relationships, and their identities became a key political issue in colonial Burma. Importantly, all natives, foreigners, and kapya were British subjects at that time. Independent Burma from 1948 through 1962 was not expressly anti-foreigner/kapya; working to naturalize those who had overstayed or remained. However, the Ne Win government from 1962 through 1988 was openly against ex-foreigner and kapya citizens, passing a new citizenship act in 1982 to downgrade their citizenship to a second class tier. The Myanmar Citizenship Law (1982), which remains in force, has downgraded the legal, political and social stature of ex-foreigner and kapya citizens. A more problematic and racist term thway-nhaw or ‘adulterated’ race has come to the fore, being used in official law-like language in recent years and highlighting the racist roots of the Myanmar Citizenship Law.

KEYWORDS:

• Mixed-race
• Myanmar
• kapya
• Myanmar citizenship law
• racism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This stems from a myth comparable to that of the lazy Malay, Filipino, and Javanese constructed by their respective colonial masters (Alatas, 1977).

2 Kala is an extremely controversial term in Myanmar’s racial and ethnic history and historiography. It is worth noting that kala was used in pre-colonial Burma without significant derogation. Kala is supposedly derived from ku-la whose Pali original simply means race, descent, or type of people (U Tun Myint, 1968, p. 14). Morphologically, ku means ‘to cross’ and la ‘to come’ so kula means ‘to move over’. So, a kala is one who has moved over to Burma. The Myanmar Dictionary gives two definitions of kala (p. 8): those who come from the Indian subcontinent; and those who come from the west of Burma/Myanmar. The second meaning includes not only those from the Indian subcontinent but also those from the West such as Great Britain, Europe, etc.—they were thus called kala-phyu or myat-hna-phyu to distinguish them from brown-skinned kala from South Asia. Those who migrate from the east or north, such as the Chinese, are not called kala, but tayoke. In contemporary Myanmar, kala is now used for Indian/South Asian Muslims or even Muslims in general, despite controversy over whether its use in informal settings is derogatory (Nyi Nyi Kyaw, 2015). Hindus are still often called kala—a term that is equally resented by Hindus as it is by Muslims (Nyi Nyi Kyaw, 2015), but kala now has strong religious connotations, reflecting the change from colonial Burma’s racial Indophobia to religious Islamophobia (Egreteau, 2011).