Exilic journeys and lives: Paths leading to a Mughal grave in Rangoon

Abstract

This article studies the exilic journeys and lives of a series of Mughals and Muslims in Burma between the 1850s and 1920s. It presents a microhistory of exiles and sojourners from north India and Europe, including that of the last Mughal king, Bahadur Shah Zafar. The stories of the men and women introduced here are microcosms of the porous borders they crossed. And Rangoon, the hub of Mughal prisoners, convicted saints, merchants, labourers and internationalists, emerged as a ‘junction box’ of Indian Ocean Islam. The article traces Zafar’s life under house arrest in Burma, and then turns to the other Mughals who had accompanied him into exile, describing their confinement, struggles, petitions and mobility extending to marriage matches. From stories of exiled Mughals, this article introduces the story of Islamic anti-imperialists of Kashmiri and Scottish origins who came together in Rangoon to memorialise Zafar. Their efforts to embellish Zafar’s majesty gradually resulted in a tomb establishing Rangoon’s leading Sufi. Rangoon’s Islamic landscape and Zafar’s Sufi afterlife will be experienced and recounted for decades to come by travellers including a Sikh woman suspected of opium smuggling, and this article begins with her observations. Together, the journeys of all these figures, minor and major, misremembered or forgotten, illuminate a porous and multi-ethnic Rangoon, and unsettle presentist imaginings of a homogeneous Myanmar.