Twice hidden, twice forgotten

Through opening the treasure trove of official and popular Burmese- and English-language documents, plus literary and journalistic media, the book examines what it meant to be or to become modern in colonial Burma. The result is enumerated in separate chapters that focus on the educated young woman, the politicised woman, the consumerist woman, the wives and mistresses of foreign men, and the self-indulgent and often westernised woman. In doing so, our sight is trained on the counterpoints that reveal the unsettling of norms and practices, and that contributed to new social formations and asymmetries. As such, the book is an exercise in the histoire des mentalités that traces the evolution of thought in an ethnically plural urban colonial environment. In doing so, the author convincingly demonstrates that the analysis of the cosmopolitanism of practices and discourses associated with women is a formidable crowbar to crack the dominant narrative. As hegemonic national epics, such narratives tend to centre on the historic role of great men while freezing the image of the late colonial period and obscuring its coincident opening to the world. Whereas in such epical accounts women are at best 'inserted' as an afterthought or an indulgent nod to their unavoidable existence, it is precisely through opening up how they experienced themselves, and how they perceived and shaped the political, cultural, and socioeconomic landscape of colonial Burma that a gendered discourse grounded in real life comes to the fore. John S. Furnivall Next to the emasculating experience of colonialism, the second dominant theme – that corroborated with the first – grounds in John Furnivall's influential characterisation of colonial Burma as a plural society in which the Burmese lived side by side with the Europeans, Chinese, and Indians that flooded the country and that monopolised the modern sector from which the Buddhist, agrarian natives were largely excluded. In Furnivall's model, the separate groups kept apart and met only in the marketplace. Whereas Furnivall's theorising is definitely an eye-opener to understanding multiple colonial realities, it bars life in the urban centres from view, especially the capital cities, while it is just there that schools, cosmopolitan communications, the presence of foreigners, and the influx of outlandish fashions and ideas – not to mention nationalism! – thrived. It is there that an interstitial room came into existence where people mixed and came out of the cocoon of their respective styles of life, while learning from each other. Through marrying a Burmese woman, she and Furnivall himself even became bridging figures. The read In Refiguring Women the focus is on such cultural brokers, on women who aspired to be abreast of the times and to participate in wider processes. Be that as it may, it is regrettable that we are left in the dark as to the quantum of such participation. However often we run into the phrase 'women students, journalists, intellectuals, lawmakers, nurses and teachers', their numbers are nowhere accounted for, even as there must be records on school and university enrolments, and public professional careers. So, whereas we run umpteen times into statements about 'Burmese women of the times', such statements remain unqualified while their wording projects the idea of a powerful trend that only in the Conclusion is qualified as confined to the colonial capital Rangoon. Apart from the lectures of my teachers, the composition of the book brought another admonishment to mind. It was the editorial advice with which I was sent home to rework my first academic monograph: "Mister Mulder, there are four paragraphs to the page". When I protested about this straightjacket, they pointed out that I should have my potential readers in mind. In the present work, two crowded paragraphs a page are the rule, even as these occasionally go on for more than the length of a full page. This makes for tiresome reading. The very exhaustive, often circular and repetitious arguments in those sections are burdensome, too, and retain the character of the dissertation the book once was. The same can be said about the steady surfeit of Burmese words that are supposed to have settled unambiguously in the reader's mind once introduced, but that are out of place if the text is to be of interest – as it is claimed – and accessible to students involved in Southeast Asian-, cultural-, colonial- and postcolonial studies, plus the broad subject of women and gender. Whereas the argument that has been delineated with crystal clarity in the Introduction certainly deserves this extensive audience, said obstacles should have been edited out.