In its decades of military rule after independence, Myanmar has flickered on the edges of India’s vision, and only in recent years has the country unveiled itself to the rest of the world. Its history is still as raw as yesterday’s newspapers, and we won’t get the long view and smooth narrative for a while yet. Nilanjana Sengupta’s heavily footnoted, indexed history, with archival photos duly labelled, gives us the plodding, dispassionate documentation that seems more appropriate at this stage.
Sengupta tells the story of four women visible in Myanmar’s long struggle for freedom: Khin Myo Chit, Ludu Daw Amar, Ma Thida and Aung San Suu Kyi. Around each she draws a picture of Burmese society, economy and politics of the time. All four chafed under the fabled gender equality of Burmese society, premised on the economic autonomy of women often encouraged and expected to run their own enterprises. This fell far short of genuine equality while allowing society to evade the issue entirely. Casting a shadow over these four is the history of a fifth, Queen Supaya-Lat, chief queen of the last king of Burma, exiled to India by the British. Supaya-Lat was notorious for her political machinations and outright brutality, but she also was an example of Burmese resistance, defying the British so bitterly that they were afraid to let her return to the fortified palace at Mandalay.
The journalist Khin Myo Chit was educated in a boys’ school and remained boyish in her interests and habits. However, like many women journalists of the early 19th century, she remained stuck writing on marriage and motherhood, and the relentless censorship of the time moderated what would otherwise have been scathing satire. Even as rising socialism and revolts among students and peasants changed social equations, women often remained on the edges of revolution to weave, melt their jewellery for the cause, nurse the wounded, and suffer. After independence from colonial rule, Khin Myo Chit and Ludu Daw Amar, like many writers, put the need to recover Burmese traditions and culture above the gender war. For Ma Thida, born in the late 1960s, economic hardship was intensified by daily humiliations arising from an all-pervasive corruption under the military regime. Her many years in prison and her spiritual search shaped her writing.
Aung San Suu Kyi is the only one of the four to have crossed over from protest to leadership, and observers who expected a Nelson Mandela in Myanmar must have been disappointed. To the majority of her people, Suu Kyi plays mother (which is not necessarily reassuring). She has explained away the oppression of the Rohingya minority, but her inaction and complicity in the matter show what Sengupta calls her “Burmese privilege”. The legacy of this leader is yet to be summarised, but Sengupta’s analysis of her life, principles and policies is frank and nuanced.
The Female Voice of Myanmar: Khin Myo Chit to Aung San Suu Kyi; Nilanjana Sengupta, Cambridge University Press, Rs. 995.
Latha Anantharaman is the author of Three Seasons: Notes from a Country Year .
