Burma's last King

DESPITE MAKING seven trips to Mandalay in the last decade, Sudha Shah, the Mumbai-based author of ‘The King in Exile”, says she still can’t fathom the hidden depths of today’s Mandalay, a city so steeped in history and regal history that it’s now on the cusp of a tourism boom.
“It’s impossible to get to know Mandalay well unless you stay for a year at a time. Can I say I know Mandalay well? I’d love to say yes but the answer is no. All my trips have focused on my research for my book. I’ve visited the palace and places related to it more often than I can count and I’ve taken lots of bullock cart rides from the palace to the Gaw Wein jetty to retrace the exile route of King Thibaw,” she says.
On that particular chapter of Mandalay’s history, Shah is an authority. At last month’s second Irrawaddy Literary Festival, the author shared her insights into the last king of Myanmar. She joined last year’s festival too, which was a great success with 140 Myanmar writers participating and what she describes as “a real buzz in the air”.
This year’s festival was bedlam right from the start – the unwanted kind, though, as a result of the authorities’ last-minute withdrawal of permission for the use of the Kuthodaw Pagoda as the venue. The organisers managed to relocate the festival to the nearby Mandalay Hill Resort Hotel.
Hundreds of local and international authors turned up along with hordes of literature buffs. In Shah’s session on King Thibaw, the two great grandsons of Myanmar’s last king were also in attendance.
“I know which gate King Thibaw exited his palace on his way to the Gaw Wein jetty as he was led out of his palace by British officers on his last day in Myanmar on his way to Yangon and India, where he was to live in exile. I also know that the family passed by the Mya Taung Monastery, which Queen Supayalat built. They took a wrong turn somewhere before arriving at the jetty late in the evening,” she says.
On that fateful day in November, 1885, two covered bullock carts, the kind commonly used in Mandalay, were waiting to transport the royal family to the Irrawaddy, where a steamer had been readied for boarding. King Thibaw, Queen Supayalat and Queen Supayagale got into one of the carts. Sinbyumashin, Queen Supayagi and the two little princesses climbed into the other. The bullock carts carrying the royal family were trailed by the maids of honour. The procession exited the walled city through the southern gate a little after 4pm.
 Shah drew her inspiration for “The King in Exile” from Amitav Ghosh’s much-acclaimed “The Glass Palace”.
“The story is powerful, and it stays with you forever. So I tried to look deeper into the subject and started gathering books about the royal family. But I couldn’t find anything written about King Thibaw during his exile. The more I went through the archives, the more interested I became in the subject. I felt like a detective with a good lead! So I ended up interviewing his descendants,” she says.
Shah found a wealth of information about King Thibaw at the National Archives of India in New Delhi as well as in the archives in Yangon and at the British Library. She was particularly amazed by a series of reports on King Thibaw filed by a British police officer who went to check on the royal family daily at their Ratnagiri residence. Shah gained access to these invaluable documents at the Indian archives.
 Over the course of Shah’s extensive archival research into the royal family, a truthful image of King Thibaw began to reveal itself.
 “What was known about him, which is now common knowledge, is that he wasn’t a good king. He shouldn’t have been king. He was not a strong, decisive personality, nor a good administrator. He had no knowledge of world affairs, politics and economics. But he was a good human being and kind-hearted. That’s how I got to know him from the viewpoint of his daughters.
“Most importantly, he never drank alcohol even though British propaganda painted a picture of him as a drunk because they wanted the country annexed. He drank no whisky. He was a staunch Buddhist, a patron of his religion. There was no alcohol in his palace. He didn’t drink even when he was exiled to India,” she says
 Shah thinks Thibaw’s downfall had to do with his inability to make the right decision rather than his being a victim of circumstance. “He leaned on the wrong people.”
As for Queen Supayalat, Shah holds that it was the mother of Supayalat, not the queen herself, who was responsible for the palace massacre in 1879. “You have to look into the context of history and of the period. Don’t judge her from today's perspective. There’s a huge exaggeration about the role she played in the massacre. It’s clear she wasn’t responsible for it. In the beginning, yes, but not later on. It was her mother who put Thibaw on the throne, again for personal gain, because he loved her daughter,” Shah says.
The Konbaung Dynasty, which ruled Myanmar from 1752 to 1885, might have come to a swift downfall, but its legacy lives on in the two great grandchildren of Thibaw. One of them, U Soe Win, is annoyed that some of Thibaw’s treasures, especially the Burma Ruby (believed to be in the UK), has still not been returned to Myanmar.
Given the riches of Myanmar’s last royal family, Shah sums her up work in one sentence: “My book tells the story of a family that once had it all, and later lost everything.”