Different Interpretation
The discussion about Saya San Rebellion always concentrated on its causes and characters. Scholars have studied on it and produced several interpretations in order to located Saya San’s position in Burmese history and examine the rebellion from different aspects.
Right on the eve of the rebellion, the leading Burmese newspaper, Thu-ri-ya (The Sun) had published an article “A Warning to the British Government” which spoke of Burma as a “key of dynamite” which could explode at any time.
The British government had recorded this event into a report “The Origin and Causes of the Burma Rebellion (1930-1932)”, which was published by 1934. It became the fundamental resource for over eighty years. According to the report： As regards the causes it is well known: (1) that the Burman is by nature restless and excitable; (2) that in spite of a high standard of literacy the Burman peasantry are incredibly ignorant and superstitious… So in authorities' eyes, the rebellion was explained with the framework of superstitious. In addition, it rejected any political causes for the rebellion.
D.G.E. Hall, the pioneer of writing history on Southeast Asia and famous British Burma’s historian, had disagreed with the reports’ finding. In terms of the cause of the rebellion, he posited political factors rather than economic ones. However, he also recognized the economic discontent. While some scholars have suggested that economic hardship was at the heart of the revolts, others have suggested that initiating a new golden age of Buddhism was an important reason. After the independence of Burma, historians tended to analyze the rebellion in more diverse scopes.
For those Burmese historians, Saya San was portrayed as an early nationalist hero. These interpretations stressed on economic factors, which was the cause of popular dissatisfaction. Different from the British discourse, the economic grievances could be the base of the movement. The movement was not aimless, instead, it was rational and justifiable.
John Cady is the first western historian to call the rebellion as the “Saya San rebellion”. He used a vast amount of British documents, including parliamentary papers and police reports, to create a narrative by recognizing the localized form of political expression. In his book A history of modern Burma, he wrote“…it was a deliberately planned affair based on traditional Burmese political and religious patterns.”
There is more researches focus on the economic perspective. Written a generation later and no doubt infused with the intellectual currents that informed both peasant studies and Southeast Asian studies, Michael Adas' The Burma delta (1974)amazon and James C. Scott's The moral economy of the peasant: Rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia (1976)amazon and Ian Brown's A colonial economy in crisis: Burma's rice cultivators and the world depression of the 1930s (2005)amazon provided in-depth analyses into the economic conditions underlying the uprisings in the 1930s. For these scholars (like their earlier Burmese colleagues), the traditional vocabulary of the rebellion was less a factor in the cause of the insurgency than the unforgiving demands of the rational state's economy.
E. Manuel Sarkisyanz’s Buddhist Background of the Burmese Revolution employed the idea of Buddhist millenarian to examine the Saya San rebellion. It represented a transition from those earlier studies which trapped in a context of colonialism or nationalism to those discourses which paid attention to the cultural ideas within a more indigenous context.
From 1970s onwards, the “autonomous history” seems to become the tendency of historiography, which reconstructed those historical figures and events by analyzing indigenous culture from the local people’s point of view.
Another important book regarding Saya San is Michael Adas’s Prophet of Rebellion.google book On the one hand, Adas emphasized on a ‘Prophetic leader’ has ability to start up a millenarian movement. On the other hand, Adas provided other four examples to justify his theory in bigger colonial situations.
One more book from Maitrii Aung-Thwin, “The Return of the Galon King: history, law, and rebellion in colonial Burma.” offers a critical assessment of the history and impact of the narrative of the Saya San revolt, an event taken as formative for Burmese history and studies of peasant rebellion worldwide. This work shows that despite all efforts to write social science objectively, ideology still rules.
While those interpretations have emerged, scholarship has raised many questions about Saya San's role in the revolt. For example, if the British falsified and overstated Saya San's role in the revolt so as to make his execution seem more meaningful than it actually was. Several details of the trial, including a diary produced by the police which outlines Saya San's plan, are not considered to be trustworthy.
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