Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xxvii, 383 pp. (Figures.) US$120.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-107-11786-0.
Readers may not be familiar with three of the four remarkable women who are not Aung San Suu Kyi but who are profiled along with her in this excellent new book by Nilanjana Sengupta: Khin Myo Chit, Ludu Daw Amar, and Dr. Ma Thida. Aung San Suu Kyi’s story is quite well known, but Sengupta shows how some of the choices she made in the past foreshadow those she is making today as the de facto head of state in Myanmar. The personal stories and writings of the other three notable women depicted in this volume may be less familiar, but make just as compelling reading.
The four women featured get more or less equal billing in this 383-page book, of which 65 pages are devoted to a very useful and detailed glossary, endnotes, bibliography, chronology of publications, and index. There are also photos, both familiar and rare. Sengupta is an intrepid and resourceful scholar who did not let her relative newness to Myanmar studies lead her to secondary sources; rather she deployed a team of Burmese researchers to translate and help her analyze Burmese primary source material including letters, journals, books, and articles by her protagonists. This book is a welcome contribution to Myanmar scholarship in many disciplines, but more importantly it is an enticement for any researcher interested in Myanmar to do more work on the status of women, the politics of sexuality, and the power dynamics between men and women.
Myanmar’s modern history comes alive through the carefully crafted personal narratives of the four extraordinary women. Ludu Daw Amar is the Mandalay-based publisher-editor of the anti-establishment leftist Ludu Press who championed critical thinking and progressive learning institutions as well as students advocating for social justice. Khin Myo Chit was prolific as a journalist, translator, and an early feminist commentator who questioned the cultural acceptance of male supremacy and the innate gender bias in Buddhism—this in a conservative and devoutly Buddhist country. We follow Ma Thida’s journey from a surgeon and writer, to prison, where she finds refuge and peace in practicing “mindfulness” meditation, and where her jailer whispered sadly to her, “Thamee [daughter], you are free but we are not.” The most prominent “voice,” of course, is that of Aung San Suu Kyi, whose trajectory from academic spouse to democracy icon to de facto leader of Myanmar is not as accidental as it appears. Sengupta points out how Suu Kyi’s earlier writings and speeches always espoused individual choice, the power of non-violent resistance, and pragmatism, as they do today.
The lives of the featured four often intertwined: Ma Thida once took a Shakespeare class with Khin Myo Chit years before she worked as a close aide to Daw Aung Suu Kyi, who admired and attended Daw Amar’s birthday parties. All four escaped their oppressive surroundings at difficult times in their lives (usually prison or house arrest) through the practice of meditation.
However, these four women of Myanmar do not represent the average female in a Burmese Buddhist patriarchy where the burden of being female in is not inconsiderable. Through the subtly feminist writings of Khin Myo Chit, we are reminded of the myriad ways women’s sexuality threatens the debasement or loss in a man of what the Burmese call “hpon,” an innately superior aura of which men are believed to possess more than women. Even today in Myanmar, the fear in Burmese society of the capacity of women to pollute or lessen men’s hpon relegates women’s htameins, or sarongs, to be dried on separate (lower) clothes lines, lest a distracted male inadvertently bump into it and endanger his precious hpon.
Khin Myo Chit focused a considerable part of her writing on Burmese society’s deeply rooted belief in women’s biological inferiority. The universal fear of woman as pollutant explains the extremes the Burmese Tatmadaw, or armed forces, went through to sabotage the perceived power of its main antagonist, Suu Kyi. Another under-studied research topic is the widespread belief in Myanmar of performing yedaya, a proscribed set of actions that is believed to pre-empt or deflect a feared or predicted negative occurrence. During the 2015 national election campaign, an example of a political yedaya appeared on the front pages of many Burmese language newspapers to much amusement. The photo of a green gourd-like vegetable on a small wooden stand perched on the roof of a local market depicted, in the eyes of Burmese society, a performance of yedaya by the military to evoke victory in the election. The Burmese acronym for the ruling party (headed by men in green military garb), rhymes with the word for this particular type of gourd, which lies on top of a market whose name sounds like “Suu Kyi.”
Ludu Daw Amar spent her long life (to age 93) focusing her writing on three major struggles for freedom: from British colonialists, Japanese occupiers, and the home grown dictatorship of General Ne Win and his successors. Daw Amar’s contemporary, Khin Myo Chit, born the same year (1915), also machinated her way around General Ne Win’s censors. Revisiting this period through the gaze of these two patriots we are reminded of the unpredictability of Burmese politics. In 1987, a year before the nationwide uprising, the famously ruthless General Ne Win gave up on a Burmese socialist utopia and offered to retire, even suggesting a public referendum on whether the country preferred a multi-party democracy. He preceded by almost 30 years a top-down opening of the country initiated by one of his successors in 2010.
In the last chapter, Sengupta uses Aung San Suu Kyi’s writings to explain her evolution from idealist to pragmatist and suggests how this may be playing out in her approach to the transition in Myanmar. Many characters from the earlier days of struggle led by Suu Kyi are now helping her, unofficially at least, run Myanmar. One of the many poignant photos in Sengupta’s book includes an iconic shot of a very young Htin Kyaw, now President Htin Kyaw, sitting locked arms with a phalanx of other student leaders “guarding” Aung San Suu Kyi at her momentous speech at the Shwedagon Pagoda on August 26, 1988.
Maureen Aung-Thwin
Open Society Foundations, New York, USA
pp. 409-411