Unwillingly Orientalist: Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’s Travel Diary to Burma as an Example of an Unusual Postcolonial Eastern European Account

“Journey to Burma” and Its Reception

Gustaw Herling-Grudziński was one of the most important Polish intellectuals and writers of the twentieth century. This onetime gulag prisoner and WWII veteran became one of the most recognized and important Polish émigré writers in the second half of the twentieth century. He was a Polish-Jewish writer who was left-leaning in his youth—and he remained a socialist throughout his life. In 1940 Herling-Grudziński was arrested when he tried to escape then Soviet-occupied eastern Poland to Lithuania. Charged with espionage, he was sentenced to a labour camp where he spent two years and became a staunch anti-communist. Released thanks to the favourable circumstances created by the Mayski-Sikorski agreement (which allowed the establishment of a Polish Army, henceforth known as the Anders Army, from prisoners from the Soviet gulags), Herling joined the Anders Army in Soviet Central Asia. The Army marched through Persia, Iraq, Palestine, and Egypt and ultimately fought the Germans in Italy in 1943–1945. After the war, Herling-Grudziński remained abroad, living first in London (until 1952, when his first wife committed suicide, something that traumatized him still further) and then in Munich. In 1955, he settled for good in Naples, Italy. In time he was able to establish himself as a writer of national and later international prominence. He is best known for his A World Apart. A Memoir of the Gulag (New York, 1951), a first-hand account from the USSR’s gulags (it is required reading in Polish secondary schools today, which makes Herling-Grudziński a recognized figure in Polish society). Within literature studies, Herling-Grudziński is even better known—namely, for his diary “A Journal Written at Night” (Dziennik pisany nocą), a multivolume diary spanning several decades.

While Gustaw Herling-Grudziński is quite well known to Slavic literature studies and among the general population of Poland, his Burmese episode is not. In 1952, the émigré writer was invited to Burma to give anti-communist lectures by On Kin, ⁵ a member of the Burmese intellectual elite and the editor of Bama Khit, a major Burmese newspaper. The offer was probably influenced by Herling’s growing reputation as an anti-communist, secured after publication of his A World Apart. For Herling-Grudziński, the Burmese offer was no doubt an attractive one, and for various reasons: the financial aspect aside, he would be able to fly for the first time in his life and could visit India during a return stopover. The diary covers an almost month-long trip: his flights to Burma from London via the Middle East and Pakistan and via India on his way back, and above all his stay in four major Burmese cities—Rangoon, Mandalay, Bassein, and Moulmein. As Herling-Grudziński himself later admitted, he “saw Burma, not counting a few big cities, from a bird’s eye view.” ⁶ As will be explained later, travelling by train, car, or ferry was deemed too dangerous due to the insurgency. “Journey to Burma” was published in installments in 1952/1953 in the Polish émigré journal Wiadomości and was later published in book form twice (London, 1983; Kraków, 1999). ⁷ It was written in Polish and it is clear that the Polish reader was to be the main recipient of Herling-Grudziński’s diary, though a Polish émigré recipient, possibly UK-based: Herling-Grudziński uses many anglicisms, occasionally does not translate quotes given in English, and—curiously enough—uses the English name “Burma” instead of the Polish “Birma.” The editor of Wiadomości wanted him to use “Birma,” but Herling-Grudziński objected and the editor conceded (the endnote states: “Burma instead of the correct Polish name Birma is the author’s very hard-won concession from the editor”). ⁸ “Journey to Burma” has yet to be translated into English.

Over time, Herling-Grudziński lost interest in his Burma diary. In 1993, when he had become a globally recognized writer, a Burmese approached him (via The New York Times Book Review) inquiring whether Herling-Grudziński had ever written anything about his Burmese trip. Herling responded thus: “It’s simple: for a Rangoon citizen who besides Burmese can only speak English, information about my little Polish book would offer no value at all. Therefore I answered with just a short, cordial note.” ⁹ This appraisal of his “little book” was an underestimation, to say the least, for “if Herling had written Podróż do Burmy in English, it would have become a classic of postcolonial literature.” ¹⁰ Unfortunately, the writer’s own lack of interest is clearly visible in the few mentions of Burma within his broader oeuvre, where the country appears only incidentally: three times (in passing) in his most famous Dziennik pisany nocą (“A Journal written by night,” 1984), where, aside from some reminiscences, Herling-Grudziński concentrates on analysing the famous Japanese movie The Burmese Harp, and once in his essay “Słoń i . . . niepodległość” (“An Elephant and . . . Independence,” 1978), a commentary on Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant.” ¹¹

For these and other reasons, “Journey to Burma” remains one of Herling-Grudziński’s least known works, with only specialists in the field of literature studies having any knowledge of it. The diary has been analysed only a few times and only by Polish literature researchers in Polish. ¹² Some exaggerate Herling’s influence by overemphasizing his role in Burma, as is the case of Anna Nasalska, who was the first to analyse Herling’s diary. ¹³ She started her description by saying that the writer’s journey was “a political mission undertaken during the beginning of the Burmese Way to Socialism.” However, the “Burmese Way to Socialism” was conceived in the late 1950s and came into being in 1962 ¹⁴ ; in 1952, when Herling was in Burma, nobody knew or had heard about an ideology that would materialize a decade later. This factual error is but one of a series of far-fetched theses. Some defy reality, as with the statement copied from Herling-Grudziński without fact-checking:

nobody takes seriously the brochure of Ba Swe, the main ideologue of Burmese socialism, who calls for mixing the ideas of a bearded German-Jewish patriarch with an Asian sage born a few thousand years ago, mysteriously smiling and gazing at his navel. ¹⁵

Nasalska repeats that “nobody takes these attempts (to marry Buddhism with socialism; a sort of Buddhist-Marxist syncretism) seriously.” ¹⁶ In reality, things were entirely the contrary: most of Burmese political thought between the 1930s and 1980s was about marrying socialism with Buddhism. This was a task taken very seriously. At other times parochially messianic, Nasalska proclaims that “Herling’s Burmese mission arises from his belonging to a nation peculiarly experienced, enslaved, and deprived of a voice,” and that

he speaks on his (nation’s) behalf, being sure about the unique responsibility of literature for the moral image of the world and in the single-handed fight with a totalitarian madness, at the same time providing testimony of his understanding of the writer’s role in exile. ¹⁷

Most importantly, Nasalska’s article is wrong in its interpretation when ascribing to Herling-Grudziński the greatest agency he ever had: “Herling notices the effects of his campaign instantly. The image of communism (among Burmese elites) . . . rapidly loses attractiveness.” ¹⁸ Reality contradicts this neocolonial interpretation (which suggests that the Burmese needed a white European to come to Burma to make them understand the imperfections of communism). Herling-Grudziński himself wrote nothing of the kind, nor did his lectures have any major impact on the Burmese elites. His trip was noted in the press: Bama Khit (whose editor-in-chief On Kin had invited Herling to Burma) and The Nation (one of the English-language newspapers) provided coverage, but otherwise Herling’s presence had no major impact on the Burmese intellectual climate or on political developments. ¹⁹ Nonetheless, the diary is altogether interesting for other reasons, to be elaborated later on.

Other interpreters either repeated Nasalska’s theses or analysed Herling’s text from the perspective of literature studies, focusing mostly on his links to Orwell and arguing that this Burma diary might have been a prototype for his much later “A Journal Written at Night.” ²⁰ What is common to these interpretations is the fact that none of these interpreters had any real knowledge about Burma and therefore were not in a position to evaluate the Burmese content of the diary. Coupled with unawareness of the existence of this diary among Burma Studies specialists (as well as among the Myanmar population), this produces a gap that demands to be filled. Furthermore, except a single unpublished MA thesis, ²¹ Herling-Grudziński’s Burma diary has not been analysed from the position of postcolonial studies either. ²² This is unfortunate, given the fact that Herling-Grudziński, a Polish writer of Jewish origins from Eastern Europe writing in the United Kingdom about a decolonizing Asian country, provides a particularly interesting case study of postcolonial ambiguity and complexity.

In-Betweenness

The methodological point of departure of this article is the well-known concept of orientalism. In Orientalism, Edward Said demonstrated how, during its long period of domination of the East, the West characterized it by “setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.” ²³ Said’s analysis was grounded on researching French and British discourse, and therefore automatically linked questions of power with imperialism in the Middle East. Both Said’s followers and critics admitted that such an approach did not show the whole picture. As Said’s analysis omitted Eastern European experiences, ²⁴ we turn to Homi Bhabha’s idea of “in-betweenness.” Bhabha refers to the “in-between” spaces as “terrain[s] for elaborating strategies of selfhood [. . .] that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.” These “interstices” (overlapping domains of difference) are fora for the negotiation of cultural values and community interests. ²⁵

Eastern Europe is a particularly apt place for applying Bhabha’s concept, as the region “has been defined by a constant production and reproduction of such overlaps of simultaneous belonging to the East and to the West.” ²⁶ Eastern Europe, especially Slavdom, has traditionally been considered a lesser part of Europe: it was “invented” in opposition to Western Europe’s Enlightenment—inherently less developed, more repressive (if not barbaric), and chaotic instead of being rational and modern. This dichotomy effectively excluded Eastern Europeans from “Europeanness,” or at best—as in the case of the Balkans—relegated them to the status of “semi-European,” which effectively has meant “semi-civilized.” Consequently, Eastern Europe was “displaced to the margins of Europe and, last but not least, shifted in mental maps further toward the Asian Orient . . . and has been identified in the West with the same values as the ‘actual’ Orient.” ²⁷

For their part, the intellectual elites of Eastern Europe aspired to be part of the European (read: Western, modern) world, and they therefore needed to self-affirm their own “European identity” ²⁸ much more than their Western European colleagues. Not rarely, then, when Eastern Europeans wrote about non-Western areas (Russia, Central Asia, the Far East, Africa, Latin America), they adopted the Western orientalist lens so that they could enhance their own identity and increase their status within world hierarchies. By shaping a Western sense of self (and defining Western values as the best), they simultaneously often enacted an “Oriental Othering of people whom they perceived to be ‘more Oriental.’” ²⁹ This phenomenon was labelled “nesting orientalisms” by Milica Bakić-Hayden. ³⁰ Naturally, this “nesting orientalism” was by no means universal: some Eastern Europeans opposed colonial, orientalist stereotypes and felt a sense of common destiny with the developed world. The East’s (including Eastern Europe’s) gaze upon the East has been an ambivalent, complex process with a multitude of stances and attitudes, from internalizing Western orientalism via various forms of hybrid approaches to its critique and rejection. ³¹ This was further problematized during the Cold War, when Eastern Europe found itself in the “Second World” and developed political, economic, and social relations with the Third World. Such “socialist postcolonialism” made it possible for Eastern Europeans to find analogies between their own fate and that of the decolonizing world. ³² What emerged, thanks to these analogies, were “new patterns of forging Otherness, different than those that originated in the colonialist West, that visibly marked their presence within the global order.” ³³

Finally, the last aspect that needs to be mentioned is the perspective of those marginalized within Eastern Europe, like the Jews. They were also Orientalized, presented as foreign and Asian/Oriental. Yet at the same time, when they happened to describe lands lying further to the east, they tended to transform into agents of Orientalization by using language and attitudes originally targeted at them to redeem their belonging to Western civilization. ³⁴ In the interwar period, “Eastern European Jews were not only on the receiving end of Orientalization, but [. . .] they were also its agents”: they “were well aware of, and highly immersed in the general Western rhetoric and clichés about the Orient,” and when they travelled, “these stereotypes helped them to redeem their sense of belonging to European culture and their whiteness.” ³⁵ Many Eastern European Jewish intellectuals wanted to be “a part of the modern discourse (which often meant the hegemonic Polish, or the Western European discourse),” but at the same time “they were usually rejected or treated with suspicion and distance by the creators of the discourse,” that is, Westerners, including Western Jews. ³⁶ When travelling to “the East,” Eastern European Jews “usually used the tools and strategies which were targeted at them” by the West; this meant their “journey and correspondence was an act of reassurance that they were part of the world’s cultural elite.” This was “an act of a multiple redemption” both vis-à-vis non-European Eastern Jews and vis-à-vis Western Jews: “the way they perceived themselves along the way helped them to feel reassured as to their own identity.” ³⁷

All these theoretical backgrounds apply—in varying degrees—to Herling-Grudziński’s Burma diary.

Coming to Burma

Before Herling-Grudziński arrived in Burma, he had read a few books about the country. George Orwell and Norman Lewis influenced him most. Orwell was one of Herling-Grudziński’s favourite authors, ³⁸ and he considered “Killing an Elephant” a “masterpiece.” ³⁹ Following George Orwell’s (Eric Blair’s) footsteps might indeed have been among the reasons Herling-Grudziśnki accepted the Burmese offer. Quotes of, references to, and discussions with Orwell’s novel Burmese Days can be found throughout the diary—in both an open and concealed way. As for Lewis’ Golden Earth, its impact is less visible though no less important. Throughout “Journey to Burma,” Lewis is not mentioned even when he should have been: Herling-Grudziński met the same people, for example, Tun Win, and repeats some of Lewis’ erroneous statements without indicating the source (i.e., he attributes to the group of chettyar moneylenders the possession of two-thirds of Burma’s land, though it was less than 50 percent). ⁴⁰ Herling revealed Lewis’ inspiration not until “An Elephant and . . . Independence,” written thirty years later, by calling Golden Earth a “beautiful book” and noting that he also met Tun Win. ⁴¹ Herling’s narrative differs from Lewis’ in one significant aspect: in Herling’s pejorative comparison of chettyars with Polish Jews, Herling-Grudziński writes understandably about Burmese dislike towards chettyars. ⁴² But given the fact that Herling-Grudziński was himself a Polonized Jew, his approach perhaps reveals the strategy mentioned above, one employed by some Jews visiting Asian countries in interwar times trying to reassure themselves of their belonging to the world they aspired to. It is also another example of Herling-Grudziński’s literary/biographical strategy with an unrecognized hidden agenda, pointed out by Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, which caused him to constantly prove his loyalty to the dominant Polish culture. As a Polish Jew, Herling-Grudziński must have been aware of the role the unjust cliché of rich Jewish landlords played in the antisemitic discourse of the interwar period, yet he used it. ⁴³

The second most important background aspect is the influence of gatekeepers. Herling-Grudziński may have not been aware of the fact that he was hosted by what, in shorthand, may be called the Burmese centre-right. The late colonial/postcolonial intellectual climate in Burma was decisively left-oriented. ⁴⁴ Those who disagreed with the left mainstream—usually ex-colonial officers—were not necessary rightists, but they were to the right of the dominant climate. Herling-Grudziński’s view of Burma was therefore distorted by his gatekeeper On Kin and his milieu. This explains why Herling-Grudziński so many times heard the opinion that Burma’s independence was premature: a view that was marginal in the 1950s’ intellectual climate in Burma, but popular among (politically helpless) ex-colonial politicians and civil-servants. This may explain, too, why Herling-Grudziński did not have a chance to talk with the most important and influential (and left-leaning) intellectuals and writers of 1950s Burma, such as Kodaw Hmaing, Thein Pe Myint, Ba Yin, Khin Maung Gale, Kyaw Thet, Ludu U Hla, Pe Maung Tin, Than Tun, Min Thu Wun, Htin Aung, Thein Han (Zawgyi), and Ba Swe (whose writings Herling dismisses as “naïve”). ⁴⁵ Instead, with the only exceptions being brief encounters with Henzada U Mya and with Prime Minister Nu, ⁴⁶ Herling met almost exclusively with colonial-era Burmese politicians critical of the Nu government (Tun Win, Ba Pe), that is, people who were politically marginal and hardly representative. ⁴⁷

From Disturbing Orientalization . . . .

A contemporary critic could easily find numerous orientalist traces throughout Herling’s travelogue. Disgust is the first one. Taken to Rangoon’s Chinatown, Herling-Grudziński “felt nauseated” seeing a slum that reminded him of “a giant trash can, which after opening the lid, swarmed with human vermin.” ⁴⁸ The squalid living conditions of the people there were due to “the plague of the animal instinct of procreation which got stuck on such a primitive level of development” that it “involuntarily generates something along the lines of disgust.” ⁴⁹ Later on, in the book, Herling-Grudziński paints the poor inhabitants of the Irrawaddy river banks as “river rats.” ⁵⁰ These dehumanizing and orientalist remarks are surprising for an author who often held to the moral high ground in his works and who is considered a “moralist” by literature critics. ⁵¹ More importantly, such orientalist language follows colonial discourse which portrayed “coloured” natives as “filthy” and “disgusting,” in contrast to the healthy and strong colonial class of masters; the “sick” were threatening the “healthy” colonial order. ⁵² Shaming the locals was yet another way to reassert the colonialists’ self-perceived superiority. ⁵³ Orwell—one of Herling’s favourite writers—caught this sentiment quite well: “people can be at ease in a foreign country only when they are disparaging the inhabitants.” ⁵⁴

Disgust is the worst yet not the only orientalizing feature. While writing about the chairman of the Youth League and a former minister, Ba Gyan, Herling-Grudziński describes him as “a man of such an incredibly low level of intelligence, that even in Burma he should have been a ministerial custodian, at best.” ⁵⁵ Later on, when Herling-Grudziński was invited for a dinner, he describes one of the local intellectuals thus:

Ba Chit is a nice, cultured, well-mannered man in his forties, but despite English manners, English-style conversation and perfect—as for Burma—English, he leads us to the table where knives and forks are laid out only next to our plates; he himself, as well as Ba Gyan and On Kin, eat all dishes with their fingers. ⁵⁶

Seeing such a paternalist approach one may wonder whether this very strategy might have been used against Herling-Grudziński in the past; it is not inconceivable to imagine a classist remark along the lines of “his very good English—for a Pole” or “he is well mannered despite coming from Eastern Europe.” By the same token, when Herling-Grudziński comments on rural politics, he is bemused that all politicians evoke Buddhist scriptures to support their claims: “the funniest thing is that both the opponents and supporters of rural reform have been finding sufficient argument in the holy texts both for and against accumulating goods.” ⁵⁷ Was he equally bemused noting that politicians in Judeo-Christian countries do exactly the same with Biblical texts? And wouldn’t he have found many examples of unintelligent people holding high political posts in the West, too?

Sometimes Herling’s orientalization was influenced by his readings. His descriptions of Burmese women, at times paternalistic, were virtually copy-pasted from Orwell. ⁵⁸ Kipling’s inspiration ⁵⁹ might be spotted here and there, too: in theorizing about Burmese “cheerfulness,” ⁶⁰ in describing Burma’s major pagoda, Shwe Dagon, ⁶¹ and especially in his demonizing portrayal of the ruins of Mandalay palace: “in the moonlight it looks like a city of cemetery spectres, in full sunlight it breathes with poisonous fumes of its history.” ⁶² Here, Herling-Grudziński refers to atrocities committed by Burmese kings, in echo of colonial writings and historiography ⁶³ (and Lewis), ⁶⁴ which all overemphasized the violent aspects of Burma’s past. Most importantly, the overall tone recalls Kipling’s “half devils” metaphor. ⁶⁵

Interestingly, in other places, Herling-Grudziński was able to paint a critical picture without falling into colonial clichés. For example, he described the World Peace Pagoda (Kaba Aye) in Rangoon as “an attempt to modernize Buddhist architecture; unfortunately, a catastrophic attempt.” ⁶⁶ This is an acceptable description even today, with Kaba Aye being widely considered an unsuccessful example of modern Burmese architecture. Unfortunately, these words are accompanied by the comment that Kaba Aye is “yet another useless pagoda” and money-consuming, too. ⁶⁷ This judgmental phrase not only fails to understand the everlasting importance of pagoda building in Burma, ⁶⁸ but it also nullifies Herling-Grudziński’s own words a couple pages earlier, when he explained the social importance of constructing pagodas in this country with a certain understanding. ⁶⁹

. . . to Astute Analyses

The orientalist examples presented above could influence an ill-disposed interpreter to reject Herling-Grudziński. However, Herling-Grudziński’s observations are valuable despite the fact that he at times succumbs to clichés, for he offers no small amount of surprisingly insightful observations about Burma that were accurate for the times, and some stand true even today. This is hardly a norm: Eastern European colonial/early postcolonial travellers to Southeast Asia usually had scant knowledge about the region and succumbed to “nesting orientalism.” But most importantly, their observations have limited value because—in short—“they got it wrong.” ⁷⁰ Herling-Grudziński, however, is an exception here: many times he got it surprisingly right—and he did so earlier than many globally established researchers and writers. This makes “Journey to Burma” a particularly valuable source.

The biggest value of Herling’s diary is his accurate reading of the socio-political situation in Burma, starting from the civil war. At the very beginning of the book, Herling-Grudziński asks his host about the itinerary of his visit; On Kin explains that they will travel by air as half the country was torn by insurgency. “Perhaps never before was information like that spoken with such cheerful indifference and calm,” notes Herling-Grudziński, only to add that “this carefree tone of talking about civil war proved to be a unifying feature of all those gathered.” ⁷¹ Herling-Grudziński thereafter quotes Burmese voices heard during a diplomatic reception:

indeed, the communists are blowing up the bridges, they are cutting the pipelines and railways, they are shooting at the boats in the Irrawaddy river, they made it impossible to transport timber to mills; they cause serious damages to the governmental forces. But so what? Communism by no means can be reconciled with Buddhism and Burma is deeply Buddhist. One may repair the damaged bridges, pipelines, and railways, but will the communists ever repair the damage they inflict on themselves by this senseless disorganization of national life? One may rebuild the villages, but will the communists ever rebuild the popularity they previously enjoyed among the Burmese peasantry? After all, the inhabitants of every village recaptured from communist hands are the best anti-communist agitators. Why? Because they watched with their own eyes how their wives and daughters were raped, they helplessly witnessed each acre of land being stripped bare in order to fund the insurgency war contribution, twice higher than the state tax.

In these circumstances, victory over the communists is “a question of patience and time.” ⁷²

This passage is remarkable on three levels. To start with, to this very day the Burmese indeed do talk about their civil war—the world’s longest!—with calm and distance. More importantly, what Herling-Grudziński quotes is precisely the reason why the communists lost the civil war. ⁷³ In Burma Studies, the dominant view holds that the victory of the Tatmadaw (Burma’s army) was due to winning over local strongmen (or bo in Burmese); the bos—the real lords of the countryside—identified the communists as “first predators” who endangered their families, homes, and paddies much more than the government did. ⁷⁴ Consequently, the bos threw their lot with the government, enabling its victory. As a classical text in Burma Studies informs us,

these local militia groups were fighting for very local concerns—safety of their homes, property, paddy, family, and the black market niche—and in number of areas, the government was much less of a threat that the earlier-arriving insurgent groups, who demanded taxes, food, and shelter from villages and townspeople. Local interests probably had identified the first predators, which were in many locales the insurgent groups, as enemies. ⁷⁵

So, Herling’s diary offers one of the earliest sources available that help to understand the dynamics of Burma’s civil war.

Although Herling-Grudziński initially had mixed feelings about this Burmese insouciance (“there was much common sense in what they say, but for a man who had heard a word or two about communist revolution techniques, it nonetheless betrayed too much phlegmatic confidence in the future”), a few lines later he quotes an Indian diplomat who says

the rebel armies are demoralized and decayed, their leaders’ rivalry splits them into several enemy camps, the government forces oust them step by step into the jungle or into the mountains . . . the Burmese can look calmly towards future. ⁷⁶

Indeed, as one Burmese historian noted, by that time the Tatmadaw

was able to move from strength to strength . . . splintering the ‘People’s Army’ into less threatening guerrilla bands . . . it was not quite over, but slowly, town by town, village by village, the Burma Army began to assert its authority. ⁷⁷

In the latter part of the book, he writes about the difficulties in telling the difference between a civilian and an insurgent, and concludes,

banditry in this form—regardless of whether covered behind the screen of “political ideology” or whether it will act on its own—will never end in Burma as long as the government fails to strengthen all garrisons in the cities and towns so that the people won’t be afraid to denunciate.”

He concludes that it is a state of “neither war nor peace. ⁷⁸

Herling-Grudziński was not only profoundly right here (it was said about the 1950s that “most local MPs or party bosses, like many insurgent leaders, were little better than petty chieftains”), ⁷⁹ but his prediction was correct, too: the civil war never ended. Although it has dimmed since the 1990s, the so-called ceasefire agreements have indeed established a grey zone between war and peace, with the embers of unrest still aglow in the peripheries, where they occasionally flare anew. That is why in terms of adequate political description, Herling-Grudziński’s profound analysis matches the best research on the Burmese civil war in Burma Studies, depicting it as “insurgency as a way of life,” ⁸⁰ “rebel politics” ⁸¹ or, unconsciously repeating the writer’s words, “neither peace nor war.” ⁸²

Herling-Grudziński was equally insightful when presenting the Karen issue, quoting both the pro-Karen narrative (their demands for independence arising from a developed national self-consciousness) and the Burmese counter-narrative (the Karen tribe-cum-nation as a side effect of colonial machinations). ⁸³ Herling-Grudziński did this in a competent, balanced way, leaving the reader with a fair assessment of the socio-political situation in Burma, a country he correctly calls (after his interlocutors) “the Yugoslavia of Southeast Asia,” ⁸⁴ using (again as one of the first) an expression that would become very popular in the mid-1950s, once Burmese-Yugoslavian relations intensified thanks to the Non-Alignment Movement.

The final, third level of Herling’s apt analysis is concerned with his observations about Buddhism. No small amount of the diary is devoted to explaining Burma’s dominant religion/philosophy. What Herling-Grudziński spotted was that the Burmese distance to reality, their telltale nonchalance towards even the grimmest of events (e.g., the civil war), is derived from Buddhism. (Mis)quoting popular words attributed to Buddha about not believing in anything if it does not agree with reason, ⁸⁵ Herling-Grudziński opines, “this thoroughly empirical approach to reality makes it easier for the Burmese to look at the world with a sceptical distance,” which translates into attempts to explain Buddhism to foreigners: “the way the Burmese try to explain the essence of their religion to Europeans is full of gentle forbearance for the deaf and the blind and has nothing to do with the fanaticism of ‘the one true faith.’” ⁸⁶ Later on, Herling recalls a meeting with a retired politician, Ten Sein (Htun Sein; Herling misspelled his name) ⁸⁷ : “how pleasant it is to talk with someone who became so furiously disappointed about politics that he almost never leaves his small hut near Rangoon” and who personifies Samuel Johnston’s words about George Lyttelton: “politics did not, however, so much engage him as to withhold his thoughts from things of more importance.” Herling concludes by quoting Ten Sein (Htun Sein): “politics should be left to those are born to it: rogues and power addicts.” ⁸⁸

Indeed, contemporary research on Buddhist political theory arrives at similar conclusions—namely, that politics in Buddhism “is a tremendous waste of time and effort”; that it is also “a prime temptation to allow the ego to run rampant” and a distraction from the more important goal of individual salvation. ⁸⁹ Accordingly, “one should not take an active role in politics for the purpose of making better policies and should instead focus on one’s spiritual life,” as Buddha did by rejecting the possibility of becoming a universal king and choosing the path of a monk instead. Thus, the message is simple:

do what you have to do; in emergencies do more than that; but do not forget that politics is largely a distraction from the important things in life [. . .] someone has to run society, but it need not to be you, and there will always be someone else eager to do it, usually for all the wrong reasons. ⁹⁰

This désintéressment and distance from political matters was captured well by Herling-Grudziński, who wrote that “Burmese monks shy away from politics, or deal with it only when it threatens religion in whatever way.” ⁹¹

The longer Herling-Grudziński stayed in Burma, the more he understood and the more he accepted the predominance of Buddhism. If the opening pages, quoted above, expressed his partial doubts and fears over the possible spread of communism (after all, he had gone to Burma to warn against communism), then with time these anxieties melted away from his diary. Meetings with monks proved decisive. Herling-Grudziński quotes an influential abbot from Mandalay who having greeted him endorsed his anti-communist lectures by saying that communism is “an evil ideology,” “bad culture,” “against religion,” and “brings the people down.” ⁹² An incident during one of his lectures in a monastery impressed Herling-Grudziński even further. When a pro-communist supporter shouted “a typical communist insult” at his host, On Kin, the abbot “started up from his chair and with a sharp voice” demanded immediate apologies. The air “was filled with electricity” and the monks prepared for a fight. But before violence broke out, the culprit walked up on the stage and “sank to his knees” before the monk. This enforced self-criticism “tellingly proved the might of Buddhist monks in Burma.” ⁹³ These observations prompted Herling-Grudziński to conclude that “in Burma Buddhism is a power against which all political parties and secular institutions fade, while the monks’ stance decides the success of any public enterprises.” ⁹⁴ Of course, Herling-Grudziński did not know about the traditional “two wheels of dhamma” governing the system ⁹⁵ and occasionally over-idealized the clergy (e.g., the monks during a meeting reminded him of “a group of Greek sages in the groves of Academe”). ⁹⁶ But that said, his observation was fitting. Indeed, one of the major reasons why Nu’s government defended itself against the communist threat was its informal alliance with the Buddhist clergy, something which proved decisive in winning the hearts and minds of the population. ⁹⁷ So Herling-Grudziński read the socio-political situation correctly. That is why, despite occasional errors and simplification, his take on Buddhism is a very strong part of the book.

“Journey to Burma” contains other astute observations, as well—social, political, and economic. Writing about Catholicism, Herling-Grudziński observes that Buddhism in Burma “deprived Catholicism of its most problematic feature—the winning of souls—while leaving it its most beautiful feature: mercy.” ⁹⁸ Although this insight was astute—Christianity indeed did function so in “Burma proper”—it did not apply in the ethnic peripheries of the country (roughly one-third of Burma) where Christianity had achieved a strong hold. In fact, Herling’s insight remains valid even today. In “Burma proper,” however, Christianity was reduced to a charity-cum-educational organization (the best schools in Burma—attended by the children of almost all Burmese elites—were Christian), ⁹⁹ and as such it has been tolerated if not respected.

Herling-Grudziński presented interesting observations about “independence disappointment,” too. Quoting conversations with Burmese socio-political elites, he notes quite universal mechanisms (“in political tactics, goals get lost,” “positions and military rank went to former idealists’ heads”), but most importantly, he reflects that “once independence was regained, all spurs to action disappeared,” while “independence proved to be unlike its ideal prototype as conceived at conspiratorial meetings.” ¹⁰⁰ This matches the observations of Melford Spiro, who did his research in early 1960s Burma. Spiro wrote about “two serious narcissistic blows” suffered by Burmese elites. First was the colonial conquest which “revealed how impotent they were, and how inferior their technology was.” ¹⁰¹ At the same time, the colonial period created a demand for the products of modern technology, and this demand could be met only by imports from the West, thus deepening the inferiority complex. Independence was believed to be a remedy for that:

after driving out the colonial oppressor, Burma, it was believed, would take its rightful place—denied it by the colonial master—in the modern world. Controlling their own destiny, in charge of their own polity, the Burmese would achieve even higher levels of technological and economic achievement. ¹⁰²

Nothing of the kind happened. Instead came the second blow: the post-independence experience, when “these high hopes were turned to ashes”: postcolonial Burma was characterized by “economic disaster [. . . ] industrial failure, and agricultural stagnation,” and this resulted in “disillusionment, humiliation, and bitterness, expressed in such disparate forms as cynicism, political apathy, and new forms of insurgency.” ¹⁰³ Thus, the remarks of Herling-Grudziński and Spiro closely align with one another, the only difference being that Herling-Grudziński had expressed them earlier.

Despite the above descriptions, the “democratic decade” of the 1950s in Burma was to become too idealized in Burma Studies historiography (this happened due to the fact that the military dictatorship that followed after 1962 was much, much worse). ¹⁰⁴ But the 1950s situation was far from rosy ¹⁰⁵ , either—and Herling-Grudziński caught this well when writing about “an atmosphere of civil war, the government’s half-terror, and subtle doctrinal hesitations” that force a significant part of Burmese intelligentsia to be cautious. ¹⁰⁶ The diary provides a good source illustrating this imperfect period.

On economic issues, Herling-Grudziński was right, too. A couple of instances of criticizing “Marxist illusions” about industrialization served him as an excuse to introduce the importance of rice to Burma’s economy. “Rice is the backbone of Burma’s economy, it feeds the entire population of Burma and remains the major item in exports,” Herling-Grudziński noted, quoting a conversation with Ba Pe, a retired politician. This prompts Herling-Grudziński to conclude, “rice and only rice pumps blood into the heart of the Burmese economy.” ¹⁰⁷ This is a correct assessment of the economic situation. Although Burma possesses an abundance of natural resources (especially gemstones) and several other competitive advantages, since colonial times its economy has been virtually a rice monoculture. During the British period, Burma was “the rice basket of Asia,” and even later rice remained its major economic asset. One may even interpret Burma’s unstable political development in the postcolonial period by tracking speculation on global rice prices and assessing their impact on the political situation. ¹⁰⁸

The Moon and a Portrait of the Prime Minister

An important part of Herling-Grudziński’s diary is the collective portrait of Burma’s Westernized elites. Herling-Grudziński doesn’t spare them, accusing them of “colonial snobbism,” contempt for ordinary people, and imitation of patronizing British ways. ¹⁰⁹ He also paints them as political hypocrites who “kneel down before dead statues of Buddha” during important festivals, but do so only because of their “revolutionary tactics.” ¹¹⁰ This observation is another that proved correct, both in its description of the superficial Westernization of the postcolonial elites ¹¹¹ and in their religiosity for show (“those who meditated furiously in strategic places [. . . ] were often the regulars on the cocktail circuits.”) ¹¹² They were—to use yet again Homi Bhabha’s term—“in-between.” ¹¹³ They were nationalists pure and simple who cheered every misfortune of the decolonizing British Empire. Nonetheless, they continued to send their offspring to British schools, they used English on official and private occasions, and they were immersed in British culture (e.g., one of most important Burmese leaders and the future dictator, general Ne Win, frequently visited Wimbledon and Ascot; the children of the Burmese elite read British classical and popular literature). Yet they were Westernized only superficially (Herling-Grudziński calls it “a thin layer of Europeanism”) ¹¹⁴ as in their everyday life and especially public life, they copied the precolonial Burmese “Heaven-Born” attitude of the ruling class ¹¹⁵ (unsurprisingly, back then the word “elites” in Burmese was a ta tan lhwa, or literally “the upper-class people”). ¹¹⁶ Herling-Grudziński’s “Journey to Burma” is again one of the first sources depicting this particular social class in Burma.

The most poignant part of the book comes when Herling-Grudziński, sitting in the Union Club, a gentlemen’s club overlooking a lake, elaborates (after Orwell) about the importance of “Europeans-only” clubs: the “shrines of racial exclusiveness” and “the symbol of contempt” for the Burmese, commenting that the clubs undermined colonial rule like nothing else. ¹¹⁷ However, “nothing is equally infectious as contempt”: it turns out that Burmese elites, who during colonial times had established their own club, the Orient Club, ignore it following independence and go only to . . . the Union Club. Herling-Grudziński calls it “ectypal snobbism,” adding that “in a country ruled by socialists, ordinary people don’t go to any club” before concluding (in echo of Voltaire):

All people are equal, but some people are more equal than others; all Burmese are brown, but some Burmese are browner than others. The moon looks at itself in the flat surface of the water as if in proof that nothing will ever change and cannot change in this best of all possible worlds. ¹¹⁸

Not all Burmese elites were like that. What really distinguishes Herling-Grudziński’s diary is his take on Nu, ¹¹⁹ the Burmese prime minister (1948–1960, with intervals, and again 1960–1962), whom Herling-Grudziński met and whom he excludes from the ranks of ordinary political hypocrites by presenting him in an intriguing, original way:

Thakin Nu in this regard is an exception hard to decipher . . . His religiosity is a bit mysterious . . . He is leftist, one of the fiercest and yet despite that, every day at dawn he walks by foot to spend a half-hour of meditation at the Golden Pagoda of Shwe Dagon. He fights for every penny for people’s schools, for the improvement of rural reform, and for the development of domestic industry. Nevertheless, he allocated millions of rupees to build yet another useless pagoda in Rangoon and, as the illuminati claim—he is much prouder of it than of all rice and weaving mills combined . . . Some of my informants ascribe this to his superstitiousness, others—to his authentic religiosity, still others—to plain demagogy. Until recently that last interpretation appealed to me the most . . . Thakin Nu stays a bit behind, assisted by two armed policemen, and watches those at prayer with an eerie smile. Painted on his pure, almost beautiful face is an expression of reverie perhaps, or maybe naïve idealism—but when he squints his eyes a little, it is hard to say how much there is in his smile of ordinary cunning and how much of genuine love and attachment. In Burma I managed to grasp that in the Far East social fanaticism is often conjoined with religious mysticism, and I am almost ready to believe in the sincerity of Thakin Nu’s morning conversations with the Golden Buddha in Shwe Dagon’s shrine. ¹²⁰

This fragment is the quintessence of Herling-Grudziński’s “Journey to Burma,” as it starkly demonstrates the book’s weakness and strength. For in this intriguing portrait of Prime Minister Nu, orientalist decorum meets surprisingly accurate analysis. Nu was indeed an extraordinary figure. He was personally religious, yet at the same time he did not hesitate to use Buddhist arguments for his own political advantage or, on the contrary, to use politics for his personal religious goals (merit making). He was a complex figure torn between passion for religion and adroit skill in politics who mingled authentic religiosity with a pragmatic usage of it for his political interests. In the same complex way, he mixed authentic humility with self-esteem and megalomania. ¹²¹ A leftist in his youth (he even wanted to translate Marx’s Capital into Burmese; instead, he translated Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people—sic!), he tried to marry capitalist critique with Buddhism (re: his “Buddhist socialism”) while having to fight against the communists. ¹²² The result was eclectic, eccentric, and indeed “hard to decipher.” Herling-Grudziński was able to catch Nu’s many inconsequences and contradictions while being able to discern Nu’s authentic, even if politically motivated, religiosity. Herling-Grudziński was also right in one further regard. Nu differed from his colleagues from the Anglicized elite. They paid only lip service to religion and had little understanding of their religious society; for them, Nu with his pagoda building and nat (spirit) worshiping was unmodern and too local, if not provincial. ¹²³ It was precisely this inability of Nu to come to terms with his Anglicized colleagues that caused his political downfall. ¹²⁴ In 1958, a split within the ruling party (Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League [AFPFL]) led to turmoil and provoked two military coups (1958, 1962) which toppled Nu’s government, established military rule in Burma, and impoverished the country even further by introducing a catastrophic leftist dictatorship (“The Burmese Way to Socialism”). Thus, one may discern Herling-Grudziński’s keen eye in perceiving the importance and uniqueness of Nu.

A couple pages later, after a conversation with another politician (Sein Ywet), Herling-Grudziński writes that Nu “serves as a bridge between the government and the people: he is a kind of guarantee that the socialists will not go too far to the left.” ¹²⁵ This is yet another insightful observation as the socialists within the army, once having removed Nu, indeed went much too far to the left, introducing their disastrous “Burmese Way to Socialism” and making Burma one of the poorest countries in the world (UN “Least Developed Country” category in 1987). Quoting Sein Ywet, Herling-Grudziński describes Nu as a “weak man” whose “weakness is however an asset in the eyes of the Burmese” and who, together with his ministers, are “like children sitting behind the wheel of a runaway car.” ¹²⁶ Although one may argue that Nu was neither weak nor lacking in skills—after all, he survived almost twelve years at the helm, defeated with his government two insurgencies, and kept Burma out of the Cold War ¹²⁷ —Herling-Grudzinski’s words align with both Nu’s own self-description (in his autobiography he called himself “an amateur at the office”) ¹²⁸ and the widely held opinion about him in Burma (he was considered “good but weak”). ¹²⁹ This, again, showcases the value of Herling-Grudziński’s book.

Conclusion

“Journey to Burma” is an unfairly forgotten piece by a famous Eastern European intellectual writing about a decolonizing Asian country. Herling-Grudziński’s Burma diary is a fascinating, non-obvious case study. It does not belong to the “socialist postcolonialism” narrative but offers a new hybrid approach. Herling-Grudziński landed at the Irrawaddy with his complicated Eastern European heritage, and in the opening pages of his diary he looked at Burma via Europeanized lenses, succumbing to certain colonial clichés and orientalist remarks on the way. Yet Herling-Grudziński was not a colonialist latecomer, even if he did write a word or two too many along orientalist lines. His Burma diary is a fascinating, ambivalent, and complex literary mosaic from a truly ambiguous writer: the text is astute and controversial, both understanding and judgmental, but it offers a fascinating case study of a postcolonial text, with a variety of tones, multiplicities, and layers.

Most importantly, Herling-Grudziński managed to summarize the socio-political reality (especially the endemic insurgency) of 1950s Burma with surprising accuracy. Coupled with his insightful remarks about Buddhism, Christianity, class, and elite status, as well as his extraordinary portrait of Prime Minister Nu, this makes “Journey to Burma” a valuable source, if not a hidden gem. Last but not least, the high literary value of his diary also deserves our attention.

Despite the controversies Herling-Grudziński’s book may raise, one thing is certain. “Journey to Burma” does not deserve to be forgotten, as it is now. Instead, it should be translated into English and Burmese, analysed, and discussed. For all its weaknesses, it is still an extraordinary, valuable, and rare Eastern European source on a 1950s decolonizing Asian country.