THERE is a certain irony in the fact that the house where Daw Khin Kyi and her daughter set up home in Delhi is today the headquarters of the Indian National Congress party—and as such is plastered with smiling images of the woman who, thanks to her close family connection to the man who negotiated the nation’s independence, has for years been the most powerful person in India: Sonia Gandhi.
Even in 1960 that elegant bungalow at 24 Akbar Road, in the gracious, leafy heart of Lutyens’s Delhi, was in the Nehru family’s gift. Jawaharlal Nehru had seen in Suu’s father Aung San a comrade and a fellow spirit; when they met in Delhi as Aung San was on his way for crucial negotiations on independence in London, he gave him sound advice and a new set of clothes. When his widow arrived nearly fifteen years later with her daughter to take up her appointment as Burma’s ambassador—her son, Suu’s surviving brother, Aung San Oo, was by now at boarding school in England and only visited in the holidays—he made sure she was set up in style. The bungalow was temporarily renamed Burma House.
India and Burma were about to move in different directions, the army taking Burma down its lonely path to a peculiar form of single-party socialism while India remained committed to multiparty democracy and was still firmly in the grip of the party that had struggled for and won independence. But in 1960 the similarities between Rangoon and Delhi would have been far more noticeable than the differences.
Flying in from Rangoon, Suu would have noted the same fiery weather, and similar brilliant flowering trees lining the streets; the same broad boulevards, built by the former colonial power and ideal for military maneuvers if required, and a huge military cantonment within easy reach of the city center, just like Rangoon’s.
Even the ethnic composition of the capital would not have been unfamiliar, for a majority of Rangoon’s population was of Indian descent until Ne Win began compulsory repatriation. A dozen years after both countries had gained independence, traveling from Rangoon to Delhi was like moving from the provinces to the center. English was the lingua franca of the elite, a language Suu was already quite at home with, thanks to the English Methodist High School; the privileges of the political and diplomatic caste she belonged to were quite as much taken for granted as the poverty of the masses; and in both cities modern Western culture seeped in, filtered but not entirely blocked by distance and Asian morality.
Yet Delhi was a center as emphatically as Rangoon was a province, and Suu’s four years in the city gave her a perspective on the land of her birth; her discovery of Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and the other giants of India’s struggle for political and cultural emancipation were to prove a vital stage in her intellectual development, one which bore fruit twenty years after she left India for England.
India and Burma both shook off British rule in the late-1940s, within five months of each other; but India had borne the colonial yoke for the best part of three centuries—with consequences for the nation’s development that Suu slowly came to appreciate as Burma grew steadily more oppressive and claustrophobic under army rule.
But for the time being what mattered was that she was abroad, but without the disorientating sense of being an alien. She was fifteen and a half on arrival, and her mother enrolled her in the closest Delhi equivalent to the school she had just left, run not by American Methodists but Irish Catholic nuns: the Convent of Jesus and Mary, with sections for boys and girls, “separated appropriately by the cathedral,” as one of her best friends put it.
That friend was Malavika Karlekar. The daughter of a senior Delhi civil servant, she was to remain close to her for the next seven years, and is still a friend today. She and Suu formed two-fifths of what Malavika called “a gang of five,” their friendship forged in the rigors of “a dreadful school.” “I don’t think Suu liked it either,” she added.
“I soon hated my new school and till well into adulthood would avoid going anywhere near it,” Malavika wrote in a memoir of her childhood. “I hated the teachers . . . and though I made friendships that have lasted through the years, felt constantly inadequate.”1
Although the school was packed with students from different religious backgrounds, many of them Hindus, the Irish Jesuits tirelessly thrust Roman Catholic Christianity down their charges’ throats. “There was no proselytization but when the gong rang at midday we were all made to kneel and say the Angelus, we had to say the Lord’s Prayer in the morning, and Hail Mary,” Malavika remembered. “Scripture was a compulsory subject for the Senior Cambridge exam, and we studied the Gospel according to St. Mark. Though not an official subject for the final examination, there was also Moral Science, a hodgepodge of dos and don’ts, all with a strong Christian undertone.”
Some teachers were also racially condescending, a reminder that the entrenched racism of colonialism was only a few years in the past. Their English teacher was called Mrs. Ince: “a good teacher,” Malavika concedes, but a racial snob. “One day, Mrs. Ince had the arrogance to punish the entire class for something or other and shout, ‘What kind of families do you girls come from?’ at a class of forty-plus girls standing with their heads down. She was greeted by silence from the daughters of senior armed forces personnel, bureaucrats, diplomats and businessmen. Clearly we were not taught to question or answer back—either at home or in school.”
Malavika continued, “The best thing about school was the new set of friends I made”: three Indians and Suu. Previous friendships were thrust into the margins: “Life with my school friends took over.”
Despite having flown in from the other end of the ex-empire, Suu was embraced without any strain. “She was not at all exotic,” Malavika recalled in an interview at Delhi’s Habitat Center, “and she was extremely plain! You wouldn’t ever think so, but she was extremely plain. She would come to school in the ambassadorial Mercedes driven by Wilson, their driver, her hair in two neat plaits and just a trace of arrowroot on her face.” What looked like arrowroot was actually thanaka, a paste produced by grinding a type of tree bark, which has been used by Burmese women for centuries as a face cream.
Soon the five of them—Malavika, Suu, Anjali, Kamala and Ambika—were spending much of their free time together, outside school as well as in. Malavika said:
There was a lot of coming and going between people’s homes. We were very close, as kids are. Her mother was a friend of my parents: It was a very small society. The five of us would spend lazy Sunday afternoons gorging on delicious khao suey, rice with prawns, at Suu’s house. Daw Khin Kyi would get this great big meal organized, she’d be there and she’d come and say hello to us. We were scared of her: Suu was under her strict supervision.
We never felt Suu was any different from us [ . . . ] We didn’t talk about Burma or the fascination of her father, but her mother would say to her, you must remember who you are. Of course we knew who her father was, my parents all knew about Aung San, it was part of the postcolonial discourse in South Asia. There’s no question about that. But to us she was no different from any of the rest of us. It wasn’t, “Oh, she’s the daughter of an assassinated leader”; rather, “She’s the daughter of an ambassador.”
While we were always aware that she was the daughter of the maker of modern Burma, she never spoke of a life in politics. In fact, if I remember right, her interests were highly literary. But what I do remember is her upright posture, never an adolescent slouch, and great pride in lineage. “I will never be allowed to forget whose daughter I am,” she would often say. History proved her right.
Harriet O’Brien, the daughter of a British diplomat then based in Delhi, visited 24 Akbar Road around this time and was powerfully struck by the refined atmosphere.
“Delhi, characterized by much heat and disorder, seemed to evaporate as we walked into the Burmese Residence,” she wrote years later.2
The living room was divided by elegant lacquer screens and was cool and very exotic with finely worked silverware on coffee tables. India outside was dirty and earthy in comparison to the neat and delicate sophistication of Daw Khin Kyi and her house. She wore longyi and aingyi and her hair was pulled back into a tight bun on the top of her head where it was ornamented with an ivory comb, a gold pin and a single flower.
In a later interview, O’Brien recalled the same occasion: “Her daughter appeared and was introduced simply as Suu. I remember being struck by how she plunged into the conversation about politics. She was seventeen or eighteen and was already a commanding person . . . Her mother was shrewd, funny and generous; she said she felt that Suu was surrounded by people who deified her father, which she didn’t think was a good thing. Her mother was a bit more relaxed than Suu. You could have a good chuckle with her. Suu was more correct.”3 Erect, correct, obedient, “under her mother’s strict supervision,” “extremely plain” . . . so far in her story there are few glimpses of the woman who would one day galvanize her nation. Perhaps the docile, slightly hangdog impression that emerges from these years was the fault of those nuns. But soon all that was to change.
After two tough years under the thumb of the Jesuits, high school was over and all five friends went on to Lady Sri Ram College, Delhi’s first degree college for girls. For Malavika it was a great improvement.
“The Convent of Jesus and Mary was horrible in the sense that I felt I was in a straitjacket,” she said. “So when we went to Lady Sri Ram, which again was like a nunnery, we thought we’d come to heaven. All our respective interests and talents flowered, Suu writing plays, all of us acting . . .”
In Delhi’s rather buttoned-up, old-fashioned society—“we had post-colonial Victorian upbringings,” Malavika said, “more than half a century after the great lady passed on”—Lady Sri Ram was a breath of fresh, relatively modern air. Founded only six years earlier, and with three hundred students, it offered Delhi’s brightest young upper-class ladies proper first degree courses in serious subjects, in surroundings that allowed them considerable freedom.
“Lady Sri Ram was different in that you didn’t have to wear uniform,” Malavika went on. “There were horrible gates that were locked and you weren’t allowed out of them, but there was no uniform, we wore saris and we could do what we liked; for example there was a canteen where we could go and sit. It was just so different.”
Although Malavika echoes Suu’s own assessment of herself as a girl with the literary bug, Suu took political science at the college—but then so did her friends. “All five of us studied Political Science,” said Malavika. “I wanted to do Chemistry honors because that’s what my father had done and I had got a distinction in that at the Convent, but my father said, ‘Chemistry . . .?’ Remember, this was in the early Sixties. You don’t do science, you don’t go all the way to the dirty great university and hang around with boys, you go to a nice girls’ college and do Political Science.”
There was a similar prejudice, Malavika remembers, against studying English. “Suu was a reader, and I think that English Literature was more of an interest for her than Political Science. She had a literary bent and a literary mind—why she went into Political Science I don’t know—but for some reason reading English Literature in those days was regarded as something we shouldn’t be doing. I don’t know why.”
But although the girls’ parents had strong opinions about what their daughters should and should not study, there is no sense that they wanted to circumscribe their ambitions. Like the parents of Suu’s friends in Rangoon, these were the most progressive and Westernized people in the city, and hoped and intended that their daughters, while remaining genteel and cultured, would go on to further study and then into significant careers.
Meanwhile Lady Sri Ram allowed them, in the most genteel way, to let their hair down. “We were all the teachers’ pets,” admitted Malavika. “We were good students, nice obedient girls from appropriate homes. We didn’t cut classes. We were not rebellious against our teachers—there was no arguing about Plato’s Republic, or why did Rousseau say this rather than that—none of that . . .”
But there was clowning—and Malavika gives a tantalizing glimpse of the funny, irreverent Suu who was later to tease both her tormentors and her supporters in Burma—the self-aware, self-mocking Suu who was to share so many jokes with Ma Thanegi as they traveled around the country.
“She wrote this spoof on Antony and Cleopatra,” she recalled. “It was very cleverly done. She had an extremely intelligent turn of phrase. And she certainly acted, in the usual ham-handed manner we all did . . .” A couple of photos of the production survive, with Suu erect and very elegant in a waisted satin robe and sandals, and with a haughty look on her face. Malavika firmly denied that Suu played Cleopatra, but to judge by the appearance of the girls in the cast photograph, she seems the most plausible candidate for the part.
Aung San Suu Kyi with friends in the cast of Anthony and Cleopatra. Suu, whose early ambition was to write, made a precocious start at Delhi’s Lady Sri Ram College, writing and acting in a spoof of Shakespeare’s play.
“In a sense Lady Sri Ram was a finishing school,” said Malavika. “But that’s not entirely true: My family had a long tradition of Oxbridge and that’s what my father wanted me to do. It wasn’t as if he was going to shove me off into an arranged marriage or anything. No way.” Instead Malavika, like Suu, was to take a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford.
While the rest of the gang remained at Lady Sri Ram for two years and emerged with degrees, Suu stayed only one year, and much of it she spent applying for and then preparing for her move to England. The British High Commissioner in Delhi at the time was Sir Paul Gore-Booth; he and his wife Lady Pat Gore-Booth had been friends of Daw Khin Kyi when Sir Paul was posted at the embassy in Rangoon. Now they very gladly acceded to Daw Khin Kyi’s request to act as her daughter’s guardians while she was in England.
Although Suu was so warmly accepted by her Indian friends, this girl from the edge of the empire had a lot to learn—and India had a lot to teach her. She and her mother were on friendly terms with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, though he was aging now and preoccupied with the problems that were shortly to flare up into war, first with China and then (after his death) again with Pakistan. She also met his daughter Indira, soon to become prime minister herself, and her sons Sanjay and Rajiv.4
Suu and her mother of course had Burmese friends, too, including a monk called U Rewata Dhamma who had come to India to study in Varanasi, and who many years later was to play a significant role during Suu’s detention. But their social set stretched far wider than that, encompassing the whole diplomatic strata of the city. Given the fame of Daw Khin Kyi’s table, the generosity of her hospitality and her qualities as a hostess—“always full of good gossip about the latest political intrigues which she dispatched with much wit and humor,” as Harriet O’Brien recalled of her a few years later in Rangoon—24 Akbar Road must have been as lively a political salon in those years as 25 Tower Lane in Rangoon had been while Aung San was alive.5
It is a little-known fact—little known except to those who have lived there—that Delhi is a very intellectual town. The conversation at dinner parties in the smart districts of London is never far from degenerating into chatter about property prices and celebrities, no matter how brainy the guests. Delhi, by contrast, where the intellectual elite has a sort of copper-bottomed stability guaranteed by the caste system, is much readier to plunge into the sort of political, philosophical or religious questions that are taboo on the other side of the world. And Suu, straight-backed, wide-eyed, and with an increasingly well-stocked mind, was paying attention.
And she was learning to hold her own, as Harriet O’Brien noticed. In Rangoon, although the sexes were in many ways relatively equal, youth deferred to age, women did not contradict men, and harmony was valued over the contentious pursuit of truth. In Delhi Suu learned, at an impressionable age, the ways of “the argumentative Indian”: the Indian delight in passionate, long-winded and often ferocious discussion, with no concern for the tender feelings of those on the other side of the table.6 It became a part of her character—one that was to cause her endless trouble twenty years later, back in the far more protocol-heavy atmosphere of Burma.
In 1962 the trajectories of India and Burma split apart permanently: In India the Congress under Nehru won another general election, though with a reduced majority, while in Burma General Ne Win launched a carefully planned and all-but bloodless coup d’état and propelled the nation down the Burmese path to socialism. Suu must have asked herself why the two countries—both steeped in Asian philosophy and wisdom, both recently freed from the colonial yoke —should have such contrasting modern destinies. Studying the lives of Gandhi, Nehru himself, Nirad C. Chaudhuri and particularly Tagore, she was already noting the differences and ruminating on the different results they produced.
There was the English language—regarded as a colonial imposition in Burma, and one that was only grudgingly accepted, while for educated Indians it was a vital and ready tool, to be appropriated and used. There was the willingness in India to accept Western ideas without surrendering your own, and the self-confidence and creativity to make from the two a new synthesis. Tagore and Gandhi had had a serious falling out, but Nehru, the family friend of Suu and her mother, succinctly expressed what the two great men shared in common, in words written during his imprisonment in the Second World War.
“Both in their different ways had a world outlook,” Nehru wrote in his book The Discovery of India, “and both were at the same time wholly Indian. They seemed to represent different but harmonious aspects of India and to complement one with the other.”7
They were also giants of their age—and Suu cast her eyes homeward in vain to find any contemporary Burman of comparable stature. Back home General Ne Win was rapidly closing the nation’s doors and windows, expelling the Indian population, closing down the newspapers and the opposition political parties and imprisoning those who spoke out against him. Meanwhile in Delhi Suu was discovering the great cry of freedom, written in English, of Rabindranath Tagore:
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.8