Editing Half-caste (section)

===Burma===

In Burma, a half-caste (or ''Kabya''<ref>{{cite web|title=Burmese Language Dictionary & Translation (search for caste)|url=http://www.burmese-dictionary.org/}}</ref>) was anyone with mixed ethnicity from Burmese and British, or Burmese and Indian. During the period of colonial rule, half-caste people were ostracised and criticised in Burmese literary and political media.  For example, a local publication in 1938 published the following:

{{quotation|"You Burmese women who fail to safeguard your own race, after you have married an Indian, your daughter whom you have begotten by such a tie takes an Indian as her husband.  As for your son, he becomes a '''half-caste''' and tries to get a pure Burmese woman. Not only you but your future generation also is those who are responsible for the ruination of the race."|An editorial in Burmese Press, 27 November 1938<ref>{{cite news|title=Burmese women who took Indians|publisher=Seq-than Journal|newspaper=Burma Press Abstract|date=5 December 1940 |id=(IOR L/R/5/207)}}</ref>}}

Similarly, Pu Gale in 1939 wrote ''Kabya Pyatthana'' (literally: The Half-Caste Problem), censured Burmese women for enabling half-caste phenomenon, with the claim, "a Burmese woman’s degenerative intercourse with an Indian threatened a spiraling destruction of Burmese society." Such criticism was not limited to a few isolated instances, or just against Burmese girls (''thet khit thami''), Indians and British husbands. Starting in early 1930s through 1950s, there was an explosion of publications, newspaper articles and cartoons with such social censorship. Included in the criticism were Chinese-Burmese half-castes.<ref>{{cite book|title=GENDER, HISTORY AND MODERNITY: REPRESENTING WOMEN IN TWENTIETH CENTURY COLONIAL BURMA| author=Chie Ikeya|author-link=Chie Ikeya|year=2006|publisher=Cornell University|url=http://ecommons.library.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/2537/1/CIdissertationpartone.pdf}}</ref>

Prior to the explosion in censorship of half-castes in early-20th-century Burma, Thant claims inter-cultural couples such as Burmese-Indian marriages were encouraged by the local population. The situation began to change as colonial developments, allocation of land, rice mills and socio-economic privileges were given to European colonial officials and to Indians who migrated to Burma thanks to economic incentives passed by the [[British Raj|Raj]]. In the late 19th century, the colonial administration viewed intermarriage as a socio-cultural problem. The colonial administration issued circulars prohibiting European officials from conjugal liaisons with Burmese women. In Burma, as in other colonies in Southeast Asia, intimate relations between native women and European men, and the half-caste progeny of such unions were considered harmful to the white minority rule founded upon carefully maintained racial hierarchies.<ref>{{cite book|author=Laura Stoler|title=Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule. |publisher=University of California Press, Berkeley| year=1983|isbn=978-0520231115}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|title=The social world of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia|author= Jean Taylor|year=1983|publisher=University of Wisconsin Press.}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|author=Penny Edwards|year=2002|title=Half Caste - staging race in British Burma|journal=Postcolonial Studies|volume=5|number=3|pages=279–295|doi=10.1080/1368879022000032793|s2cid=143709779}}</ref>