The Female Voice of Myanmar: Khin Myo Chit to Aung San Suu Kyi

The Female Voice of Myanmar: Khin Myo Chit to Aung San Suu Kyi Nilanjana Sengupta Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 407p.The female voice of the title of Nilanjana Sengupta's book belongs to four twentieth century women writers and activists: Khin Myo Chit, Ludu Daw Amar, Ma Thida, and Aung San Suu Kyi. The Female Voice of Myanmar: Khin Myo Chit to Aung San Suu Kyi traces the course of each of these women's lives and works, identifying the democracy movement of 1988 as the point at which their four stories converge. Sengupta's juxtaposition of these four narratives illuminates the changing political landscape of twentieth century Myanmar from a specifically female perspective.Sengupta opens her analysis with the story of Supaya-Lat, the last queen of independent Burma. Supaya-Lat was villainized by the generations who came after her as an ambitious and ruthless woman, blamed for the British conquest. She became a frequently invoked example of the catastrophic consequences of undue female influence. By placing this story at the start of her analysis, Sengupta emphasizes the gendered challenges that have existed for any woman in Myanmar who chooses to work actively for political change. The recurring question of how women can negotiate the fraught realm of politics is one of the threads that Sengupta uses to bind together her narrative.Dividing her work into four main chapters, each devoted to one woman, Sengupta draws extensively on each of these women's published writings in English and Burmese. Writing about women whose life stories at times overlapped in time and space, she also identifies parallels and connections in the way that these women wrote about and experienced gender politics and national politics. This work is a hybrid: literary biography and political analysis. While the title may suggest that this work is a broad survey of twentieth century Burmese women's writing, this is not the case. Sengupta's exploration is finely focused and richly detailed.The first chapter focuses on Khin Myo Chit, born in 1915 when Burma was still under British rule. In her description of Khin Myo Chit's childhood, Sengupta introduces one of the themes that will recur throughout the book: the challenges facing women who deviated from prescribed feminine expectations. Khin Myo Chit is described as a girl who "picked up boyish habits to survive in a male-dominated world" (p. 17). She was driven to seek a secondary education, leaving her family's home near Mandalay for Rangoon University in 1933. There she joined the emerging student nationalist movement, and carved out a niche for herself writing for various magazines and papers, though she found her choice of subject matter somewhat constrained by her gender. Khin Myo Chit's involvement with nationalist politics continued during the Second World War and the Japanese occupation of Burma. Her literary career straddled the colonial and postcolonial eras, and after the military coup of 1962, she wrote for the government paper Working People's Daily, walking what Sengupta describes as a "tightrope" in the face of enhanced government press scrutiny. Khin Myo Chit deployed wit and irony to indirectly express her criticism of an increasingly repressive government regime. When her association with Working People's Daily ended in 1968, she continued to write, exploring Burmese history and culture in fiction and non-fiction. She was particularly interested in the role of women in society: she translated a selection of Englishlanguage essays on the subject that would be published posthumously in 2006. Khin Myo Chit advocated for democracy in the revolution of 1988, and in the last decade of her life her path intersected with Aung San Suu Kyi, whom she hosted after her first release from house arrest.Born in the same year as Khin Myo Chit, Ludu Daw Amar also attended Rangoon University, and joined the nationalist movement. …