AUNG SAN SUU KYI emerged from detention in November 2010 as radiant as a lily, as if she had just returned from a holiday. The generals had contrived the election, from which she had been barred, and made sure that their proxy party won. Her marginalization was now official. But none of that made any difference: Her gate was besieged by thousands of supporters, braving the fury of the regime, in the first scenes of mass happiness in Rangoon in more than eight years.

From the earliest days of her political life, Suu has been attacked by the regime as the “poster girl” of the West. If that was a gross exaggeration in 1989, today it would be an understatement: She is by far the most famous woman politician in the world never to have held office, the most famous Burmese person since the late UN Secretary General U Thant and, along with the Dalai Lama, the most feted exponent of nonviolent political resistance since Mahatma Gandhi. She is a familiar figure to millions of people around the world who have no idea how to pronounce her name or where to place Burma on the world map.

But the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi did nothing out of the ordinary before becoming a political star—that she insisted on being described as a housewife—has led many people who should know better to underrate her.¹

Thant Myint-U, grandson of U Thant, in his book The River of Lost Footsteps, casts Suu as little more than a footnote to a narrative dominated down the ages by ruthless military men.² Michael W. Charney, in his History of Modern Burma, sees her as significant chiefly as the embodiment, for the regime, of the menace from abroad, rather than as a positive force for real change.³ A previous biographer, Justin Wintle, comes to the eccentric conclusion that she herself is to blame for her fate. “Aung San Suu Kyi has become the perfect hostage,” he writes. “. . . Kept in captivity in part brought about by her own intransigence, the songbird’s freedom has a price that no one can, or any longer dares, pay. The latest apostle of nonviolence is imprisoned by her creed.”⁴

To blame Suu for being locked up for so many years is perverse, like blaming Joan of Arc for being burned at the stake. Yet it is true that her imprisonment has in a sense been voluntary, and this is one of the things that explains her enduring and almost universal popularity with ordinary Burmese people.

Suu’s detention was never strictly comparable to Nelson Mandela’s twenty-seven years’ imprisonment on Robben Island because, unlike Mandela, she was free to leave. At any time in her years of confinement between 1989 and 2009, she could have phoned her contact in the regime, packed a suitcase, said goodbye to her faithful housekeepers and companions, taken a taxi to the airport and flown away; but it would have been with the certainty, if she did, that her passport would have been cancelled and that she would never have been permitted to return. And by flying away to the safe and loving embrace of the outside world, she would have vindicated all the slurs of her enemies, and the worst apprehensions of her supporters.

This choice is something she has rarely discussed, probably because it touches on the most personal and painful aspects of the life she has lived since 1988—on her decision effectively to renounce her role as a wife and mother. But the reality of this choice has also been used by the regime to torture her. This became most brutally true in January 1999, four years after the end of her first spell of detention. The news arrived from Oxford that her husband, Michael, had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and did not have long to live. Despite this, and despite appeals from many well-placed friends including Prince Charles and Countess Mountbatten, the regime refused to grant him a visa to enable him to visit her. The intention was clear: to induce her to follow the dictates of her heart and fly home to his bedside, as nine years before she had flown to Rangoon to the bedside of her mother. Knowing she would never be let back in, she refused to do it. Those in Asia and elsewhere who regarded her as lacking in female warmth felt confirmed in their view. Barely three months later, Michael died.

Justin Wintle is therefore perhaps right to use the word “intransigence” to describe Suu’s attitude through her years of confinement. It would have been entirely human, completely understandable, if at some point she had given up and gone home. No one would have blamed her. She would have been hailed and feted everywhere she went. She could have spent precious weeks with her dying husband, and today would no doubt be dashing from conference to conference, banging the drum for Burmese democracy. What difference would it have made if the lights in number 54 University Avenue had gone out for good?

The answer is, a great deal of difference. For Suu’s impact has been spiritual and emotional as much as political.

As the letters she wrote to Michael and her essays on Burma both before and after her return make clear, Suu was acutely aware of the suffering of her people long before she returned to live there: of the poverty forced on the inhabitants of this naturally rich land by the idiocy of its rulers, on the stunting of bodies and minds by criminal economic and social policies. When this privileged expatriate flew to Rangoon in 1988 and found herself in the thick of the greatest popular uprising in the nation’s history, something clicked. Her people’s suffering was no longer something distant and academic: It was a cause she embraced, with the passion to change it. Choosing to form and lead the NLD and fight the election, she made a compact with her country: They were no longer separate, no longer divisible. The harder the regime tried to paint her as a foreign decadent, a puppet of the West, a bird of passage, a poster girl, the more fiercely she insisted that she was one with her countrymen.

It is this decision—a moral much more than a political decision, and one from which she has not deviated in more than twenty years, despite every attempt to blackmail her emotionally—which has earned her an unwavering place in the hearts of tens of millions of Burmese. She could have flown away, and she never did. That has created an unbreakable bond.

But there is far more to Suu’s career than simple commitment, however vital that element is. Suu had been thinking hard for many years about what it meant to be the daughter of the man who negotiated Burma’s independence. She had a profound desire to be a daughter worthy of him, to do something for her nation of which both she and he could be proud. The tragic first decades of Burma’s history as an independent nation, its fragile democracy snuffed out by the army, brought home to her how hard it would be to bring her nation into the modern world without doing violence to its innermost values. In the years before 1988 she had devoted much time and research to that question. Suddenly, against all odds, she had the opportunity, and the duty, to resolve it. She has not yet succeeded. But that is not the same as to say that she has failed.

*

Aung San Suu Kyi was born on June 19, 1945, in the Irrawaddy Delta, the third of three children, during the most tumultuous years in Burma’s history. Her father, Aung San, was at the heart of the tumult. Rangoon, the capital, had just fallen to the Allies, and her pregnant mother had sought refuge from the fighting in the countryside.

Aung San was a boy from the provinces, shy, a poor speaker, with abrupt manners, and prone to long unexplained silences.⁵ Short and wiry, with the sort of blankness of expression that leads Westerners to describe people from the East as inscrutable, he also had something special about him, a charisma. With a fiery temper and an iron will, he emerged at Rangoon University in the 1930s as one of the most ambitious and determined of the students dedicated to freeing Burma from the British.

Burma was an imperial afterthought for Britain, annexed in three stages during the nineteenth century after one of the last Burmese kings had infuriated them by launching attacks on Bengal, the oldest and at the time the richest and most important part of the Indian empire. Annexing Burma was also an effective way to erect a bulwark against further French expansion in Indochina. But it was never central to British designs in the way that India had become: It was ruled from India as an appendix, and few British administrators took the trouble to try to make sense of Burmese history, philosophy or psychology in the way generations of Bengal-based East India Company officers had done with India. The British simply brought the country to heel, in the most brutally straightforward manner they could, by abolishing the monarchy and sending the last king and his queen into exile. They opened up to foreign enterprises opportunities to extract timber, to mine gems and silver and to drill for oil, and allowed Indian and Chinese businessmen and laborers to flood in.

The process of being annexed and digested by a colonial power was acutely humiliating for every country that experienced it. Nonetheless, in many parts of the British Empire, as the foreigners introduced systems and ideas that improved living standards for many, more and more middle-class and ruling-class subjects would become, to a greater or lesser degree, complicit with the rulers. The pain of subjugation softened with the passing of generations, as the native elite was absorbed into the “steel frame” of the empire, the bureaucratic superstructure that kept the whole enterprise ticking over. That helps to explain why, in some quarters, one can still find nostalgia for the Raj, right across the subcontinent.

But the Burmese experience was very different.⁶ It started very late: Lower Burma, centered on Rangoon, was seized during the first Anglo-Burmese War in 1824, and was rapidly denatured as the British threw open the gates. Within a couple of decades Burmese residents found themselves a minority in their own city, bystanders to its transformation. In the north, Burmese kings still ruled: a tradition sanctified, guided and held in check by the sangha, the organization of Buddhist monks which had underpinned the nation’s spiritual and political life since the eleventh century, retaining that role through innumerable wars and several changes of dynasty.

But in 1885 the British finished the job, storming Mandalay, the last seat of the kings, sacking the palace, burning much of the ancient library and sending King Thibaw and his queen Supayalat into exile in western India. They brought the whole kingdom into the Indian system, governing it from the Viceroy’s palace in Calcutta, and supplementing or replacing the local rulers who had been the king’s allies with British administrators. They brought in tens of thousands of troops to suppress the rebellions that kept breaking out, until the Pax Britannica prevailed across the country.

But by the time Burma had been subdued, the Indians across the border were themselves becoming restless. The Indian National Congress had been founded in 1885, the year the Burmese monarchy was abolished, and rapidly became the focus for Indian hopes of self-government. The First World War weakened the empire dramatically. The arrival of Mohandas Gandhi from South Africa gave Congress a leader of unique charisma and creativity, and the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar in 1919 brought home the fact that British rule was a confidence trick, with hundreds of millions of Indians kept in check by a threat of force that the few thousand British in residence could never carry out effectively.

Across the Naga Hills, the Burmese drank the fresh ignominy of being colonial subjects to colonial subjects. Peasants tilling the paddy fields were trapped into debt by the Indian moneylenders who fanned out across the country. In Rangoon, foreign shopkeepers and businessmen grew rich exploiting the naïve natives. With the abolition of the monarchy, things fell apart. In lower Burma the British had refused to accept the authority of the thathanabaing, the senior monk authorized by the king to maintain the discipline and guide the teachings of the country’s hundreds of thousands of monks, and in his absence local Buddhist sanghas lost their direction.⁷ Then, sixty years later, King Thibaw was exiled and the monarchy destroyed. It was the coup de grâce.

The first nationalist stirrings in Burma came out of Buddhism and the Buddhist clergy. Traditionally, soon after dawn each morning, in every town and village in the land, monks in their maroon robes would tramp in file through the lanes, their big lacquer bowls extended for alms. They were the potent local symbols of a moral, theological and political system that had governed people’s lives throughout Burmese history and which, according to their belief system, gave them their best hope of nirvana. The monks enshrined and sanctified the authority of the Buddhist king, and the people, by giving the monks alms, and by inscribing their own sons in the monastery when they were “big enough to scare away the crows,” gained spiritual merit which was obtainable in no other way.⁸

Now all this was smashed and ruined. It was worse than mere humiliation: The nation had lost its compass. In response, the Young Men’s Buddhist Association, or YMBA, in imitation of the YMCA, was established. It was a critical first step, less in defying the British than in asserting or reinventing an order that resonated with traditional Burmese beliefs. The most significant figure to emerge from this, in the feverish years after the First World War, was U Ottama: a learned Buddhist monk, who had also traveled around Asia and come back with the news that faraway Japan, another Buddhist country and one that had succeeded in repelling invaders and remaining independent, had actually beaten the Russians, a full-fledged European power, in war.

By the 1920s, under huge pressure from Gandhi and the Congress, Britain had conceded to India important measures of self-government, and the nationalist agitators in Rangoon, advised and cajoled by Indian radicals who had slipped over from Bengal, found that, although their movement was young and raw compared to India’s, they had the wind in their sails. By the time Aung San arrived at Rangoon University from his home in the little central Burmese town of Natmauk in 1932, independence no longer seemed an impossible dream. But the more the British conceded, the more impatient the nationalists both of India and Burma became to win full independence.

With his gauche manner, his up-country origins and his clumsy English, Aung San struggled to make an impact among the metropolitan elite of the capital’s university. But those who jeered at his contributions to the Students’ Union debates and implored him to stop trying to speak English and stick to Burmese, soon learned that this difficult, angular young man had formidable determination. He wouldn’t give up a challenge—trying to speak English, for example—until he had actually mastered it. Gradually he emerged as one of the leaders of a group of revolutionary nationalists at the university. Their ideology was hazy, leaning towards socialism and communism but with a deep commitment to Buddhism as well.

They took to calling themselves the “Thakins”: The word means lord and master, roughly equivalent to “Sahib” in India. After conquering Burma the arrogant British had appropriated the title. Now these Burmese upstarts were demanding it back. They “proclaimed the birthright of the Burmese to be their own masters,” as Suu wrote in a sketch of her father’s life; the title “gave their names a touch of pugnacious nationalism.”⁹

Aung San and his friends were developing the courage to claw back what the invaders had stolen, beginning with pride and self-respect. He was in Rangoon for the momentous events of 1938 (year 1300 in the Burmese calendar, so known subsequently as the “Revolution of 1300”). Despite the fact that the British had already conceded a great deal, separating Burma from India and allowing the country, like India itself, to be ruled by an elected governing council under the supervision of the British governor, agitation for full independence reached its peak in that year, with peasants and oil industry workers striking and joining the students in demonstrations in Rangoon. During one baton charge to disperse the protesters, a student demonstrator was killed.

Schools across the country struck in protest, communal riots broke out between Burmans and Indian Muslims, seventeen protesters died under police fire during protests in Mandalay and the government of Prime Minister Ba Maw collapsed.¹⁰

Then the Second World War broke out in Europe, and while Gandhi in India launched his “Quit India Movement,” demanding that the British leave at once, and Subhas Chandra Bose in Calcutta began secretly training his Indian National Army, Aung San and the other Thakins decided to look east.

Ever since U Ottama had returned from his wanderings, spreading the word about the achievements of the Japanese against the Russians, the Burmese nationalists had been open to the possibility that liberation might come from that direction. Aung San was no Gandhian: He accepted that Burma would be unlikely to gain its freedom without fighting for it. And in August 1940 he and one other Thakin comrade took the boldest step of their lives when they secretly flew out of the country, to Amoy in China, now Xiamen, in Fujian province.

Their apparent intention was to make contact with Chinese insurgents, either Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang or Mao Zedong’s Communists—anyone with the wherewithal to help them evict the British. But Fujian was already in the hands of the expanding Japanese. And when a Japanese secret agent based in Rangoon, Keiji Suzuki, learned of the two Burmese Thakins roaming the city’s streets, he arranged for them to be befriended by his co-nationals. In November 1940 they were flown to Tokyo, where Suzuki himself took them in hand.

It was Aung San’s first experience of the world beyond Burma’s borders, and he was impressed. Despite misgivings about the authoritarian brutality of Japanese militarism—and his prudish horror when Suzuki offered to provide him with a woman—he was awed by the industrial achievements of his hosts, and pragmatic enough, and politically immature enough, to have no inhibitions about being enlisted by Japanese fascists in their plans for the domination of Asia. After three months in Japan he flew back to Rangoon disguised as a Chinese sailor and set about recruiting the core of what was to become the Burma Independence Army (BIA). Much of 1941 was taken up with the rigorous, secret training of that tiny army, later to be immortalized as the “Thirty Comrades,” on the island of Hainan, with Suzuki as commanding officer and general and Aung San as his chief of staff.

So when Japan launched its air attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and immediately afterwards began its invasion of Southeast Asia, Aung San and his comrades were ready to play their part. Rangoon was shattered by a Japanese bombing raid in the same month, and soon afterwards the Japanese and the BIA entered the country together, streaming up from the “tail of the Burmese kite,” the long thin peninsula of Tenasserim that stretches south and east from the Irrawaddy Delta. As they marched, tens of thousands of Burmese joined the new national army until they were 50,000-strong, almost as large a force as the Japanese. The hopelessly unprepared British, routed by the Japanese all over Southeast Asia, fled for the safety of India. Thousands who failed to make it were taken prisoner and forced to build the notorious “death railway” linking Burma and Thailand.

But Burmese misgivings about the Japanese, which had already begun gnawing at Aung San during his first months of exposure to the fascist regime in Tokyo, grew exponentially in 1942, once the Japanese had taken control of the country. They talked a good talk about how the Japanese and Burmese, being brother Asiatics and sharing the same religion, must move together, but the Burmese, Aung San included, were quickly learning that Japanese rhetoric and Japanese intentions were two different things. The Japanese tatemae, what appeared on the surface, might speak of Burmese independence, but the honne, the unspoken reality, would be that “mighty Nippon” remained firmly in charge behind the scenes.¹¹ Burma’s true destiny, in the Japanese scheme, was to form one of the many obedient and industrious Asian races near the base of the Japanese pyramid, with the Japanese emperor at its apex. Aung San and the other founding members of the Burma Independence Army gradually discovered to their horror that they had swapped one form of enslavement for another. Quietly they began to prepare to fight for their freedom all over again.

It was around this time that malaria and the rigors of building an army and leading the invasion of his own country undermined Chief of Staff Aung San’s health, and he was committed to Rangoon General Hospital—an institution that plays a remarkably large part in this story, in one way or another—to recover his strength. The junior nurses were terrorized by his gruff manners and moody silences, so he was looked after by a senior staff nurse called Ma Khin Kyi. He appreciated her expert attentions and feminine graces, and she for her part fell sway to his charisma. A few months later, in September 1942, they married.

In the wedding photograph, Aung San sits like a coiled spring. He and his bride share a large, overstuffed sofa, sitting a good six inches apart. She has jasmine in her hair, a floral garland round her shoulders and a long white robe that sweeps the floor; her black eyebrows offset large, gentle, wide-set eyes. He is shaven-headed and dressed in his army uniform, his knee-length boots brightly polished. He grasps his slouch hat in both hands and leans forward, ready, one feels, to jump up and strike at the first opportunity. It is the portrait of a man who has already achieved a lot, but who knows that he cannot rest, that his work is not even half done.

And so it was to prove. In March 1944 he was flown to Tokyo to be decorated by the emperor and promoted to the rank of major general. In August Burma was declared an independent nation, and the BIA renamed the Burma National Army. But it was all a sham. The Japanese realized that the army they had created under Suzuki was no longer to be trusted and kept moving its units around Burma to make it more difficult for them to organize. Meanwhile Japan was rapidly losing the war, as its lines of supply from Tokyo became impossibly overstretched, and its technological and financial limitations compared with those of the Americans became ever more starkly apparent.

Aung San had now been around the Japanese long enough to know how to play the game by their rules. He accepted their honors with a stiff bow, did as he was told, kept an impassive face—and quietly set about organizing his second war of independence. Soon after his latest trip to Tokyo he made contact with the Allies across the Naga Hills, and began to prepare to open an internal front against the Japanese once the Allies invaded. With their support he secretly set up a resistance movement to work in tandem with his army as a partisan force, the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL).

But he maintained the pretence of loyalty to his masters. On March 17, 1945, standing alongside senior Japanese officers, he took a pledge at Rangoon’s City Hall to launch the Burma National Army’s campaign against the Allies, and while a Japanese military band played, his army marched out of Rangoon in the direction of the front. But once outside the city they scattered, following a prearranged plan, to base areas throughout central and lower Burma, and ten days later launched their attack on the Japanese. By August 4th, after tens of thousands of Japanese had been slaughtered by the Allies, now aided by Aung San’s “Patriot Burmese Forces” as they were renamed, in increasingly one-sided battles, the war in Burma was over. It was between those two crucial dates that Aung San Suu Kyi entered the world.

Aung San was still only thirty when the Japanese surrendered, but he had matured beyond recognition since his clumsy performances in university debates ten years before. He had shown great courage, determination and cool-headedness as he took the leading role first in forging Burma’s first army since the fall of the king in 1885, then turning it, with perfect timing, against the power that had sponsored it. As the war ground on, his popularity among his people grew: To many millions of Burmese he seemed the only young leader with the determination, agility and charismatic appeal to save their country from utter destruction. And when the Allies finally arrived in Rangoon and met him face to face, they took the measure of this man, who had changed sides so nimbly, and decided that he was someone they could work with. Field Marshal William Slim, the British general who captured the Burmese capital on May 3rd at the head of the Fourteenth Army, took the view that he was “a genuine patriot and a well-balanced realist . . . the greatest impression he made on me was one of honesty.”¹²

With peace the British returned, reinstalling their former governor, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, but they found the situation very different from when they had left in 1941. The country’s towns and cities had been devastated by the battles between the Allies and Japanese; in the British parliament, one MP said the degree of destruction in Burma was worse than in any other area in the East. And the Burmese under Aung San and his comrades in the AFPFL, hardened by years of war and hungry for the freedom for which they had been fighting so long, were no longer in a mood to compromise.

Unable to submit to Aung San’s demands—which amounted to handing the government of the country over to his League—Dorman-Smith packed the executive council with pro-British Burmese who had no popular following. Aung San responded by calling on the Burmese to launch concerted nonviolent action against the British, refusing to pay rents and taxes or supply them with food. Dorman-Smith was recalled to London, resigning soon afterwards; a Labor government under Attlee replaced the Conservatives, and in early 1947 Aung San and his colleagues were invited to London to negotiate a settlement. During a stopover in Delhi he made no bones about his position. He told journalists that he wanted “complete independence,” not dominion status or any other halfway compromise—and that if he was not granted it, he would have “no inhibitions of any kind” about launching a struggle, nonviolent or violent or both, to obtain it.¹³

Once again, his timing was superb: Attlee’s government was ideologically committed to freeing as many colonies as it could, and was in any case too strapped for cash to follow any other course. Aung San returned home with a promise of full independence. Burma would be a challenging country to rule: The Burman race to which he belonged was only one of several major ethnic groups within or straddling its borders, and the war had poisoned relations between them. But the following month the Panglong Conference in Shan State, in the northeast, secured the agreement of all of the main ones (except the Karen, who boycotted it, demanding their own state) to the proposed new nation. When elections for the Constituent Assembly were held on April 9, 1947, Aung San’s AFPFL won 248 of the 255 seats. Aung San was not only the father of Burma’s army and the hero of its freedom struggle but now the preeminent leader of the nation as well.

It would be too brutal to say that he timed his death with equal panache. Little more than three months after his landslide election victory, on July 19, 1947, he was chairing a meeting of the Governor’s Executive Council in Rangoon’s huge Secretariat Building, the colonial behemoth that still dominates a large part of downtown Rangoon, discussing, ironically enough, the theft of 200 Bren guns from the ordnance depot a week before, when a jeep pulled up outside. Five men in fatigues jumped out, stormed into the building, ran up the stairs, felled the single guard at the door, then burst in and slaughtered most of the council where they sat with automatic gunfire, Aung San included. An embittered political enemy of Aung San’s was blamed for the attack, and later hanged. Factionalism and jealousy, “the two scourges of Burmese politics” according to Aung San Suu Kyi, had robbed the country of its most promising leader, less than a year before the independence to which he had dedicated his life was granted.

*

Aung San, his wife Ma Khin Kyi and their first baby, Aung San Oo (Oo means simply “first”).

Aung San Suu Kyi was two years old when her father died, “too young,” as she put it, “to remember him.”¹⁴ In one of the last photographs taken before his death Aung San appears to have mellowed considerably since that nervous, high-intensity wedding picture. He and Ma Khin Kyi smile toothily at each other across the three children, two sons and a daughter, that she has borne him. One of Aung San’s hands holds the hand of Aung San Lin, their younger son, his other rests on Suu’s shoulder. Suu has protruding ears and looks up at the camera in frank alarm. As in the earlier photograph, Ma Khin Kyi has flowers in her hair, which is coiled in a cylindrical bun, and she looks as calm, radiant and tender as before.

Aung San, his wife Ma Khin Kyi and their three children, Aung San Oo, Aung San Lin and Aung San Suu Kyi (left).

There are numerous strange and ghostly parallels between the life of the heroic father and that of his daughter. It was in 1938 that the so-called “Revolution of 1300” occurred, the nationwide outbreak of strikes and protests that propelled Aung San and his comrades along the road to independence. And it was exactly fifty years later, in 1988, that the greatest uprising in independent Burma’s history occurred, propelling Suu to the leadership of the democracy movement.

It was in Rangoon General Hospital in 1941, when he was a patient and she was a nurse, that Aung San met his future wife, Ma Khin Kyi; and it was in the same hospital forty-seven years later, when Ma Khin Kyi was a patient, having suffered a crippling stroke, and Aung San Suu Kyi was nursing her, that she met the students wounded when the army fired on their demonstrations; it was also outside that same hospital, on August 24, 1988, that she spoke to a political meeting for the first time in her life. Two days later she addressed a crowd of hundreds of thousands at the Shwedagon pagoda, the national shrine where Aung San had lambasted British rule before the war.

The Shwedagon Pagoda, Rangoon, outside which Suu gave her crucial debut speech.

The vengefulness of Aung San’s enemies robbed his family of a husband and father; the vengefulness and fearfulness of the military regime quite as effectively robbed Aung San Suu Kyi’s family of a wife and mother.

Aung San won an overwhelming mandate from his people in 1947 but was cut down before he could show what he might have been capable of in government. His daughter won an equally imposing majority but was prevented almost as decisively from doing anything with it.

In these ways Suu’s whole life has been haunted by the glory of what her father achieved, by an awareness of how much was left unfinished at the time of his premature death, and by regret for how much was done wrongly or inadequately by those who took his place; for independent Burma, which was to such a great extent Aung San’s personal achievement, was launched badly and unhappily, like a wagon with one buckled wheel, after that murderous attack.

When Suu was fifteen the family moved to Delhi, where her mother became the Burmese ambassador. It was an honor, but it was also a way for General Ne Win, the head of the army who would shortly become the nation’s dictator, to get a politically inconvenient person out of the way before he seized power.

Intellectually, moving to India proved to be a crucial step for Suu. In the Indian capital she discovered at first hand what a backwater she had been born and raised in, and began to learn how a great civilization, which had been under the thumb of the imperialists for far longer than Burma, had not lost its soul in the process, but rather had discovered new modes of feeling and expression that were a creative blend of Indian tradition and the modernity the British brought with them.¹⁵

In Burma, colonialism had been experienced as a zero-sum game: The further the foreigners intruded into Burmese life, it was felt, the more the Burmese lost touch with their own traditions, ending up deracinated, demoralized and cynical. But now Suu discovered that just over the Burmese border in Bengal, in the cradle of Britain’s Indian empire, a creative renaissance had been set in motion, with the active participation of both Englishmen and Indians, which had resulted in a new synthesis, the forging of new tools to understand and even to mold the developing modern world. In an important essay she wrote many years later, comparing the intellectual life of Burma and India, she sketched what she felt Burma needed, and what it had so far entirely lacked.

“And what should they know of England who only England know?” Kipling had asked rhetorically, and Aung San Suu Kyi came to feel the same way about her own homeland: Only by leaving it could you really see it, and now she saw its follies and limitations with the clarity of the self-exiled. In an essay written two decades later she quoted the caustic judgment of an early countryman who had traveled abroad, U May Oung, who joined the Young Men’s Buddhist Association in 1908 after qualifying as a barrister in London. The modern Burman, May Oung wrote, was “a Burman to all outward appearances, but entirely out of harmony with his surroundings. He laughed at the old school of men . . . he thought there was nothing to be learned from them . . . he had adopted the luxuries but not the steadfastness and high-souled integrity of the European, the lavish display of wealth but not the business instincts of the Indian, the love of sensuous ease but not the frantic perseverance of the Chinaman.”¹⁶

Suu examined her countrymen from her new perspective and saw how right May Oung had been. And she compared the sad figure of the confused and superficial modernized Burmese with the sort of Indians who had emerged from early encounters with the British in Bengal. In particular she describes Rammohun Roy, the eighteenth-century Bengali scholar known as “the father of the Indian Renaissance.” She wrote:

Rammohun Roy set the tone for the Indian Renaissance, which was essentially a search for ways and means of revitalizing the classical heritage of India, so that it could face the onslaught of new and alien forces without losing its individual character or failing to fulfill the demands of a rapidly changing society . . . It was important that social, religious and political aspects of reform should move together . . . But . . . the underlying purpose tended to be the same: to bring India into harmonious step with modern developments without losing her identity.¹⁷

“To bring Burma into step with modern developments without losing her identity”: That could be the challenge of a lifetime. This quotation is taken from a long and subtle essay, first published in 1990, in which Suu compares the intellectual life of India and Burma; but in a sense it was a letter to herself, setting out the sort of mental and emotional, not to mention spiritual and political, development that Burma cried out for, and which, in the first, bruising century of its encounter with modernity, it had almost entirely lacked—and which (the essay implies rather than says it) only someone like Suu herself, a child of Burma who was also steeped in the modern wisdom of India and points west, might be able to provide. These were some of the seminal ideas that an adolescence spent among the brilliant and highly articulate brains of New Delhi had planted and watered.

In New Delhi, and later at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she read Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE), Suu was developing her ideas of how Burma needed to change so that it could embrace democratic development in the way India had, without losing touch with its identity. But in the real world back home, following his coup d’état, General Ne Win had embarked on a reckless adventure in eccentric, home-grown socialism, nationalizing everything, closing down parliament, terminating the free press and jailing anyone who resisted. Anticipating Afghanistan’s Taliban by a couple of decades, he closed down popular entertainments, including horse racing.¹⁸

Millions of ethnic Indians, many of whom had been in Burma for generations, were forcibly repatriated and Burma’s other links with the outside world, such as the Ford Foundation and the British Council, were rapidly eliminated. The sort of ideologically driven economic disaster that overtook much of the socialist world in these years was now enacted in Burma, too, and the “rice bowl of Asia” became a net importer of food. The nation began a long descent through the world’s rankings, ending in the ignominious position, twenty-five years after the coup d’état, of having to ask the United Nations to grant it “least-developed nation status,” in order to receive the handouts that go with it.

On the other side of the world, Suu graduated from Oxford and worked for three years at the United Nations in New York under the Burmese Secretary General U Thant. Returning to England she married Michael Aris, a Tibet scholar, and they settled down in Oxford with their two small sons. Amid the responsibilities of raising a family on a small academic income, any grand ideas Suu may have entertained about her possible role in Burma shrank in scale.

Yet, as Aris later wrote, Suu had never forgotten who she was and who her father was, had never renounced the idea that sometime, at some unimaginable future date, her country might need her. “From her earliest childhood,” he wrote in 1991, “Suu has been deeply preoccupied with the question of what she might do to help her people. She never for a moment forgot that she was the daughter of Burma’s national hero . . . She always used to say to me that if her people ever needed her, she would not fail them.”¹⁹ In the months before they married, she wrote to him over and over again, and in her loving letters the same anxious theme kept recurring. “Again and again she expressed her worry that her family and people might misinterpret our marriage and see it as a lessening of her devotion to them,” he writes. “She constantly reminded me that one day she would have to return to Burma, that she counted on my support at that time, not as her due, but as a favor.”²⁰

And he quotes from some of these letters—almost unbearably painful to read now, nearly forty years on, more than ten years after Michael’s death, and twenty years after she was first confined to her home.

In the end the destiny about which she had such a strong intuition did indeed call. As Michael Aris wrote, there is no indication that she saw it coming. But then suddenly it was there, standing before her, unarguably huge and fearful and compelling. And all she did, all she is still doing, is to answer its call.