“The Royal Sacred Hairy Family of Burmah”: Human Difference and Biocultural Empire in the Nineteenth Century

Saha, Jonathan

Abstract

Imagine two men conversing on the deck of a steamer headed for England in the early summer of 1886. Perhaps the ship had just navigated the Suez Canal and their conversation takes place under the warm Mediterranean sun. One of the men is an engineer employed on the vessel, the other is a passenger. The engineer is headed back home. He writes letters to his parents in Hartlepool, a small port town in the midst of one of the country’s largest industrial coal mining areas. In his correspondence he recounts his conversations with this passenger: a man unlike any other he has met before in his life, a man far from home. In fact, the passenger had traveled very little in his life prior to this journey. Up until December 1885, this man had only known the cloistered courtly life of precolonial Mandalay with its ornate palace complex hidden behind moat and high citadel walls: a stark contrast to the bustling, coal-dusted docks of Hartlepool. The engineer is able to hold a conversation with this foreign man across the language barrier due to the Burmese passenger’s rapid acquisition of English during the journey. It is a pleasing image of a brief bridge across cultures. But, nevertheless, this was an innocuous encounter that would have been unworthy of report in the local Hartlepool newspaper had it not been for one singular aspect of the passenger’s appearance: his face and body were covered with hair, several inches long.[1] This passenger was known as Maung Po Set and he was traveling with his family,[2] several members of which also had this same unusual pattern of hair growth. A few months earlier, the last king of the once-powerful Konbaung dynasty—an empire that at its height ruled over what is today Myanmar, as well as parts of Thailand, Bangladesh, and India—King Thibaw had been deposed. In the wake of his fall, Maung Po Set’s family.

Citation

Saha, J. (2024). “The Royal Sacred Hairy Family of Burmah”: Human Difference and Biocultural Empire in the Nineteenth Century. In A. Burton, R. Mawani, & S. Frost (Eds.), Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Lifeworlds (135-156). Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350454231.ch-5

• Online Publication Date: Nov 18, 2024
• Publication Date: Nov 18, 2024
• Deposit Date: Nov 29, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 29, 2024
• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 135-156
• Book Title: Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Lifeworlds
• Chapter Number: 5
• ISBN: 9781350454231; 9781350451087
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350454231.ch-5
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3110140