Colonial Spatial Demarcations in British Indian Rangoon

Burma now Myanmar was part of British India for over 100 years. Burma’s colonial experiences position it closer to South Asian experiences than colonial experiences of other parts of Southeast Asia such as Malaya, Vietnam or Indonesia. The British annexed Burma gradually starting in 1826 with the Eastern and Southern parts of the present geographic entity of Burma. Rangoon (now Yangon) was occupied by the British in 1852, and the town was quickly planted with churches, mosques and pretentious grand Indo-Saracenic commercial and administrative buildings designed by British architects and engineers based in British India. Rangoon became thus another showpiece of the pompous colonial architecture of British India. In India, the British usually divided the colonized cities into White Town and Black Town, spatially differentiating the European population, administration and businesses in the White Town from the native Asian population in the Black Town. This paper discusses the extent into which colonial Rangoon as a British Indian construct was segregated along the lines of White Town/ Black Town. The paper furthermore explores the legacies of these colonial racial demarcations and power hierarchies in contemporary Rangoon.