Another class not native, but long resident in Upper Burma, are the Ponnâs or Brahmins from Manipur. To one accustomed to meet with that caste in India they look very degenerate, and although they still wear the sacred Brahmin thread over the shoulder as in India, they seem to have become very much less fastidious about mixing with other castes than their brethren of the great continent. They seem to enjoy a position of considerable standing and influence in the country of their adoption, and gain a good livelihood by the two apparently not very kindred occupations of dairy-keeping and fortune-telling. It is their reputation for the latter that gains them their position of importance with a light-hearted, casual and very superstitious people like the Burmans. This soothsaying seems to be quite a recognised function, that makes the Ponnâ welcome throughout Burmese society, and nowhere more so than at court. In their literature, the Ponnâ constantly figures as an honoured and indispensable personage at the palace, whose business it is to study the stars, consult the horoscopes, make known lucky days, and, in fact, decide the thousand and one important affairs of life wherein the Burman considers it necessary to appeal to the occult.
Coming now to the mercantile classes, we have some interesting specimens. First, the Suratees, keen business men, merchants and shopkeepers, men capable of large transactions, Mahomedans in religion, Oriental in dress. The leading member of this community in Upper Burma, a very wealthy man, did a good deal of financing for the king, and no doubt made it pay well. When the downfall of the Burman kingdom took place he came to no harm. Amongst other transactions he was the lessee of the Great Bazaar, and as the lease had still some years to run, he continued to hold it, and profited greatly by the enormously improved trade.
The Marwarees are another class of traders hailing from India. They are Hindus from Gujerat, wholesale dealers in piece goods, and very smart business men.
The Moguls are Mahomedans from Persia, with a complexion almost as fair as a European’s. They are the only people of all the many nationalities I have met with in the East who dress exactly like the pictures that are drawn of Bible scenes and characters. The special shape and size of turban, and the long loose outer garment some of them wear, put one in mind of the pictures exactly.
A cosmopolitan place would be incomplete without some Jews. We have them in Mandalay of various nationalities, European and Oriental, and they seem to be all shopkeepers. One firm hail from Baghdad, very near the dwelling-place of our first parents, and speak a vernacular which they call Hebrew.
The principal native bankers are the Hindu Chetties from the Madras Presidency. They are a remarkable class of people, very wealthy, very keen at business, men of their word in all transactions, being fully alive to the value of keeping their credit by an unstained reputation in finances; and if one firm of their community find it difficult to make their payments, the rest of the Chetty firms will usually come to their help, to save the reputation of the whole. Yet with all this they dress, eat and live as if they had a very meagre income, and have the appearance of mere savages. The vast array of naked skin they show is almost black in complexion, and they have almost no education beyond the bare necessities of finance. Their food is of the simplest; their houses, all on the two sides of one street to be near each other, are substantially built to protect them from thieves, but almost devoid of all furniture. They are not negligent of religion, for as soon as they came they secured land and built a Hindu temple. Their dress, consisting of two pieces of thin white cotton cloth, one round the waist and the other loosely thrown over one shoulder, could be bought for three-and-sixpence; the closely shaven head has no covering, and the feet none. Such is the Tamil Chetty, the very last man in all Mandalay you would take for a wealthy money-lender; but he is in great request with the improvident Burmans who possess any property upon which it is possible to borrow. The Chetties came over to Mandalay when the country was annexed; their keen business instincts telling them two things—one, that there would now be plenty of business doing; the other, that it would now be safe to come and do it. The prospects of those who get into their clutches are not bright. The price of money is very high in the East. The late Earl of Beaconsfield speaks somewhere of “the sweet simplicity of the three per cents,” but the Tamil Chetty considers twenty-five per cent. per annum much simpler.
Leaving the mercantile and moneyed classes, and coming to the rank and file, there are in Mandalay some thousands of natives from many different parts of India, speaking many languages, and engaging in a great variety of callings. Europeans often think of India as a country, but it is really a continent, and has as great, if not a far greater, variety of peoples and tribes than Europe presents. There is the Bengalee Baboo, probably a clerk, the Hindustanee doorkeeper or messenger, the Tamil overseer or coolie. Even in our Sepoy army in Mandalay one sees great variety. There is the tall hardy Punjabee, the wild Pathan and the still wilder Beloochee. There is the jolly stout little Goorkha, who stands in such good repute as a fighting man; the somewhat weedy-looking Madrassee, whose name does not rank high for valour; and there is the brave, fierce-looking Sikh, with a national-religious scruple against cutting his hair, who curls the two ends of his beard up round his two ears when it becomes too long to hang down. What tact it must require to mould out of these diverse elements “the finest body of disciplined Asiatic troops in existence,” and yet we are told, and it is true, that the real strength and safety of our Indian Sepoy army lies in the judicious blending and balancing of these diverse elements, a lesson which the great mutiny unmistakably taught us.
We depend very much upon Indians for the supplying of our wants in Burma. The butcher, the baker, the washerman, the cook, the railway porter, the writer, the messenger, the soldier, the cabman, the postman, the farrier, the sweetmeat vendor, the sweeper, are in almost all instances natives of India, for the easy-going Burman lets all these employments slip past him.
The place is quite a Babel for languages. The names of the stations on the railway indicate the polyglot character of the population. It is of course out of the question to attempt to represent even the half of the tongues commonly spoken, but they select the five which we may presume are in most common use, English, Burmese, Hindustanee, Hindi and Tamil, and the name of the station is painted in all these.
The Chinese in Burma are worthy of special mention as forming an important community in every great centre of population. In Mandalay they are numerous, occupying almost entirely both sides of one long street, called after them China Street, as well as other localities in the town. They seem to settle down and marry Burmese women and live very happily. They are keener business men than the Burmans, more knowing, more enterprising, more persevering, more industrious. The Burman is as good at carpentry as he is at anything; that is, in fact, one of his strongest points, but John Chinaman ousts him completely at that. Leaving the little petty carpentry to the Burmans, he carries all before him in large building contracts. Though John’s rates are higher he does the work better, and what is important to the English mind, he finishes the work in the time stated. Some of the Chinese are shopkeepers. Whilst many Chinamen are thus a boon to the country, and valued as a useful class of workers, others again do much mischief, corrupting the people wherever they go—keeping liquor shops, diligently spreading the opium-smoking habit, and pandering to the natural love of the Burmans for gambling. The offenders against the excise laws—cunning secreters and workers of illicit stills—are usually Chinese.