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THE FEMALE VOICE OF MYANMAR: Khin Myo Chit to Aung San Suu Kyi. By Nilanjana Sengupta. Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xxvii, 383pp. (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...