Ship me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst
Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst
For the temple-bells are callin’, an’ it’s there that I would be. 1
Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Mandalay’ might not be seen as an imaginative
opening for a thesis on the police in colonial Burma. But it points to a
paradox.
The romantic imagining of Burma, projected by Kipling and others, belied
an often grim reality. Burma was the least populated province of British
India (apart from Assam) yet the ‘most criminal’. 2 Here surely was a
territory which demanded a strong and efficient police force. Yet
throughout the colonial period, Burma’s police were seen as weak and