Burma and India: Some Aspects of Intellectual Life Under Colonialism

For the major part of its time under colonial rule, Burma was administered as a province of the British Indian empire. It was during this period that Burma began to develop along modern lines. However, the development of both countries assumed their own separate forms, influenced by their greatly different historical and cultural backgrounds. This book looks at a variety of these differences and in the way in which they affected the intellectual values of the two countries. As in many other Asian colonies which became independent after the Second World War, there was a strong connexion between nationalist movements and intellectual developments in Burma and India. This short study seeks to discover the nature of this connexion and to establish why the kind of fusion between eastern and western intellectual traditions represented by the Indian Renaissance failed to take place in Burma. The comparative approach helps in bringing out the important role which religious principles and social practices played in shaping the attitudes of colonized peoples towards new ideas ushered by the imposition of alien rule.