Myanmar, as Burma has come to be known since 1989, has been in the news in recent years for the persecution of the Bengali-speaking Muslim Rohingya and the crackdown on media coverage of happenings in southwestern Rakhine State.
Its civilian leader, State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, has fallen from grace in the eyes of the global community. From having been a Nobel Peace Prize-winning symbol of quiet defiance against the nation’s repressive military junta, to now being seen as an apologist for the army’s ‘genocidal’ excesses in Rakhine, the leader of the National League for Democracy remains an enigma, like her country, to most people. It is against this backdrop that Abhijit Dutta’s brilliantly researched and constructed Myanmar in the World — Journeys Through A Changing Burma is set. The book makes for a compelling read, offering as it does deep and layered insights into one of our least known and understood neighbours; and the crucial pivot for India’s ‘Look East Policy’.
To Yangon, on a whim
As a journalist who flies into Yangon on a whim, in 2012, and finds himself inextricably tied up with the momentous by-elections that would place Suu Kyi in her country’s Parliament, Dutta proceeds to take the reader along on his personal voyage of discovery of the land and its people. Its history and culture are shaped by geography, sited as it is between India to its west and northwest and China to its north and northeast. One small crib here though, the publisher ought to have included maps.
Dutta’s eye for detail and a desire to ensure that his narratives are grounded in experience result in sharply etched vignettes of a country and society in flux. With an almost ethnographic approach, he constructs his narratives around the locals he meets and befriends during his travels across the country. For instance, Gulam, a taxi-driver who turns Airbnb host and muse for the book’s first chapter, ‘India’s farthermost province’, is the grandson of a sugar merchant from Gujarat who ended up settling in what was then Rangoon. Dutta weaves a fine tapestry using historical strands that shuttle across time and context to bring into relief the colonial era capital city’s impact on contemporary Myanmar.
From the Rakhine State to the Green Borderlands, Dutta’s spare prose offers insights into the soul of Burma’s multi-ethnic Buddhist society. The book is a poignant picture of a country grappling from birth with multiple insurgencies that have centralised the role of the majority Bamar dominated Tatmadaw and its powerful generals, who remain loath to cede power. “Will Myanmar be a vibrant society a decade from now?” Dutta asks in his Epilogue: Fighting Peacock. The answer he submits would hinge on Suu Kyi’s survival and success.
Myanmar in the World — Journeys Through A Changing Burma ; Abhijit Dutta, Aleph, ₹799.
