Moving to Burma in search of work

Emigration records show that several people from Andhra Pradesh, and from the then Vizagapatam district in particular, migrated to Burma, beginning in the late 1800s and continuing right into the 1930s, when changing British policies and World War II put hurdles in their path. As most of them belonged to lower castes from rural areas, and there was a huge difference between wages to be earned in Vizagapatam district and Burma, it may safely be conjectured that Burma provided a route out of caste discrimination and poverty for these men (most of the womenfolk stayed back in the villages to tend to their fields and take care of their extended families). And this was not indentured labour; these labourers were freemen who chose to move to Burma for a better life.

Where the average agricultural labourer earned just four annas a day in his native village, in Burma he could choose among various options, including dock, port, and rice mill labour and agricultural work in the rice fields, all of which could earn him from 8 to 12 annas a day. It is also telling that the immigration more or less began in the worst drought years of 1876-77. In later times of famine, when the British finally came to the rescue of the sufferers with work-for-food projects, most of the labourers who turned up were women; most of the men had apparently emigrated to Burma. Over the years, the availability of transportation in the form of regular shipping services between Koringa in Andhra Pradesh and Rangoon in Burma also helped along this wave of emigration, and as the years progressed, the number of emigrants (mostly men) kept rising.

As is still common today, labour contractors or maistries, as they are better known in northern Andhra Pradesh, played a big role in the recruitment of these emigrants. Having provided the loan required to pay for the passage, as well as food, bed, and boarding during the voyage, apart from the sums required to maintain a family in the village until the labourer could send home his wages, these maistries had a strong hold on these men. They negotiated with the employers in Burma and they distributed the wages to the labourers, taking as big a cut as they thought fit as payment for their middle-man services. However, the arrangement still turned out to be a good deal for the emigrant labourers: By the end of two to three years they would have cleared all their debts back home and even managed to save a few hundred rupees.

But this prosperous stint slowed down, first in the 1930s and early 1940s when anti-India feeling and the Japanese invasion of Burma forced many Indian workers to flee the country and later in the 1960s, when one more wave of anti-India riots forced many of them to retreat, first to Assam and later further down south.

My father’s work, in a remote station of the Indian Railways, brought us close to one such family: Apparao and Yellamma were both railway workers and Yellamma also used to work in our house as a part-time maid. With her experience as maid in an Englishman’s house in Burma, Yellamma definitely knew how to run a house, and my mother, then barely 25 years old, valued her advice on everything from stocking the kitchen to folding the napkins to raising a child. The family had travelled all the way back from Rangoon and considered themselves extremely fortunate for having found themselves government jobs. After all, they had half a dozen children to raise and no land or savings to fall back on. Later they asked for and got a transfer to Visakhapatnam, where they both retired and now live with their children.