In early March 1901, a barefoot Buddhist monk challenged an off-duty colonial policeman in Rangoon, ordering him to take his shoes off while on the grounds of the sacred Shwedagon pagoda. Shoes are considered dirty in much of Asia and are normally removed in religious spaces. But a mere 15 years after the final Anglo-Burmese war, the conquerors – whether soldiers, police or tourists – wore them everywhere.
Not only would this confrontation reverberate across Burma, becoming a key symbolic issue in the development of anti-colonial resistance; but it was also an early exemplar of integrated, personal-political activism, before Gandhi and later developments such as the US civil rights movement. As such, it has much to teach us for today.
Wearing shoes was one of many distinctions used in the high imperial era to set colonising Europeans apart from, and above the Asians who massively outnumbered them, but this particular drama was heightened because the monk, U Dhammaloka, was himself white and Irish.
