Place · colonial capital & exile city · Myanmar
Rangoon / Yangon
The capital of British Burma, an Indian-majority city for much of the colonial period, where Bahadur Shah Zafar died in exile in 1862 and where Bose proclaimed the provisional government's advance on India in 1944.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 16.866, 96.195
Worth knowing
Burma was governed as a province of India until 1937, and Rangoon's commerce, labour and money-lending were largely Indian — which is why the anti-Indian riots of 1930 and 1938 happened, and why some half a million people walked out to Bengal and Assam in 1942 ahead of the Japanese.
Connections (2)
- Life routeBahādur Shāh Zafar
Zafar was tried in his own Diwan-i-Khas in 1858 for waging war against a Company whose subject he had never legally been, and deported to Rangoon with his wife Zinat Mahal and two sons. He died there in 1862 and was buried at night in a grave left unmarked so that it could not become a shrine; it was rediscovered in 1991 during digging. Two of his sons had already been shot at Delhi by Hodson.
- Power passed toKolkata: Fort William & the Maidan
Burma was governed as a province of British India from 1886 until 1937, administered from Calcutta and then Delhi, and Rangoon's commerce, labour, money-lending and civil service were substantially Indian. That is why Zafar could be exiled there as an internal transfer, why the Chettiar banking houses ended up owning much of lower Burma's rice land by the 1930s, and why the anti-Indian riots of 1930 and 1938 happened when the depression hit.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Yangon”. Parliamentary Papers and the Mutiny Narratives; Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt; William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal.
Open Rangoon / Yangon in the repository →