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

• Author: Clapp, Priscilla
• Position: Book review

The Female Voice of Myanmar: Khin Myo Chit to Aung San Suu Kyi. By Nilanjana Sengupta. Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Hardcover: 383pp.

In The Female Voice of Myanmar, Nilanjana Sengupta has produced a wealth of historical, social and intellectual background for the events we see unfolding in Myanmar today. Using the voices of four prominent women, the author takes the reader on a journey through Myanmar's political history since the end of the colonial period. The result is a rich amalgam of life at the intersection of political, intellectual and religious thought among the opposition movements under a succession of governments.

The book's first voice, Daw Khin Myo Chit, was a prolific literary author whose work extended from the late colonial period through the Ne Win era. Her observations of life, political thought and religion--meticulously researched and analyzed by Sengupta --provide a window into the origins of the country's political opposition movement, as it proceeded from the anti-colonial movement through the Japanese occupation and then splintered into a number of competing political groups that eventually brought the end of elected government in 1962.

Ludu Daw Amar provides the second voice. Stalwarts of the Mandalay political opposition during the post-colonial period, she and her husband published an anti-establishment journal [Ludu) that was highly critical of the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League government. Together, their writings chronicled the political ferment of the 1950s and 1960s and the various voices of the times. Quintessentially Burmese nationalists, they formed a part of the country's communist movement. Their lives and literature illustrated the level of political intolerance that existed during the U Nu government and then blossomed under Ne Win.

Both Daw Khin Myo Chit and Ludu Daw Amar were part of Aung San's generation and their lives intersected with his in various ways, a fact which bridges them with Aung San's daughter in later years. When Aung San Suu Kyi was released from detention in 2002, Mandalay was one of her early destinations to pay homage to Ludu Daw Amar and other opposition supporters.

The third voice is Ma Thida, who began her literary career as a protege of Aung San Suu Kyi during her early political years before the 1990 elections. She served on Daw Suu's political campaign, chronicling their travels around the country. Ma Thida's association with opposition political...