In a blog post published a few months ago, Matt Houlbrook, the historian of twentieth-century Britain, wrote about the difficulties he had deciding what name to call the man that he has been studying for over a decade. This ‘trickster prince’ went by many aliases during his life. Matt (if I may?) also discussed the dilemma of whether it was better to refer to people in our studies by their first or by their surnames. Is a sense of familiarity in our writing a good thing? And how might our choices chime with the class politics of who was (and is) referred to by their surname and who by their given name? His post reminded me of the dilemma that I had when writing my book on corruption in late nineteenth-century colonial Burma.
The problems Matt raised were compounded by two further factors in this context. The first was the impact of the colonial bureaucracy on how Burmese names were recorded. The second was Burmese naming conventions.
The sources that I used to complete my research were hundreds of case files filled with materials gathered during investigations led by high-ranking British officials into everyday corruption. These files contained memos, informal notes, witness statements, petitions, written explanations from accused officials, court records, and completed investigative reports. In these documents, the male subordinate Burmese officials nearly all had Maung at the start of their names.
Maung means young brother in Burmese, and it is a term reserved mainly for male children and teenagers. It is also how people deemed to be of a lower social status might be addressed by people who perceive themselves to be of a better status. However, British officials used it to refer to nearly all Burmese officials, regardless of age or social standing. Correspondingly, British officials were supposed to be addressed as Thakin, or master, by Burmese subordinate officials. So, Maung was a sign of colonial authority.
However, Maung is also a fairly popular name itself. In Burma it is unusual to have a family name. Instead, people often have given names that traditionally have been based on the day of the week that a person was born. It is not unheard of for people to have only one name, and there is some evidence to suggest that this might have been more common in the past. As a result, I was never entirely sure whether Maung was always an element added by British officials or whether it was already part of their given name.
Burmese naming practices meant that the British bureaucracy evidently struggled to keep tabs on who was who within their employment. In one case, a particularly corrupt township officer was referred to in official correspondence as Maung Gyi (8). There were so many officials with that name that high-ranking British officials had taken to numbering them. The British were individuating people with the same name in a highly impersonal, indeed depersonalizing, manner.
It seemed to me, that using the names as they were recorded in bureaucratic correspondence would be to re-inscribe the colonial hierarchy implicit in the use of Maung. But, on the other hand, this would have meant that the names in my writing and the names that appeared in the extended quotes I used, would have been inconsistent with one another. Moreover, I worried that it would be harder for future historians to seek out the individuals that I wrote about within the imperial archive. In the end, I just used the names as they appeared in the record. However, I am still unsure and uneasy about my decision. I suppose I let academic formality and convention trump post-colonial rigour. Either way, the recording of names is one of the many ways that the practices of colonization continue to subtly inform the histories that we write.