An Embryonic Border: Racial Discourses and Compulsory Vaccination for Indian Immigrants at Ports in Colonial Burma, 1870-1937

This paper examines how an administrative border emerged between historically and culturally different and geographically separate regions which nevertheless had been integrated into one state under the colonial power. As a result of three Anglo-Burmese wars in the 19th century, Burma was colonized by the British. During the course of its colonization, the country formally became a province of India. Hence no border had existed between Burma and the rest of India until 1937 when the former was separated from the latter. This connection with India brought Burma unrestricted labour supply from India which was necessary for the growth of the economy. But at the same time, such a vast flow of people included undesirable elements like criminals, beggars and people sick of infectious diseases which caused social problems in Burma. While the government of Burma attempted to deter or exclude those undesirable elements in order to maintain social order, these attempts were frustrated by several factors. In spite of these circumstances, the local government started taking more decisive policy for examinations of immigrants after the middle of the 1910s. No border existed yet, but port cities, especially Rangoon, gradually assumed function of checking people who came from “outside” into “inside”. I would like to call this phenomenon, tentatively, the emergence of an embryonic border. As a part of this phenomenon, this paper describes a history of sanitary regulations for Indian immigrant labourers in colonial Burma, by focusing on a case of implementation of compulsory vaccination at ports. And it points out that those regulations were