U Thant, first Burmese member of the Left Book Club, fervent admirer of the Labor politician Stafford Cripps, makes an ideal symbol for his grandson's sensitive reading of the Raj period. An elite that might have furthered British aims was systematically alienated and insulted.
The British, generalizing from their experience with the Gurkhas of Nepal, recruited their army from the mountainous tribal regions. The Burmese, mighty warriors in their own mind, were dismissed as insufficiently martial — childlike and lazy in fact. "It was a policy choice that rankled deeply in the Burmese imagination, eating away at their sense of pride and turning the idea of a Burmese army into a central element of the nationalist dream," Thant writes.
The closer he draws to the present, the more spirited Thant becomes. He has an understated, British sense of humor (Ne Win is introduced as "playboy, tyrant, numerologist and onetime post office clerk") and a subversive attraction to strange details that might not necessarily advance his story but most certainly ornament it.
He gives the ingredients for the house cocktail served at the Pegu Club in Rangoon, and notes that Rudyard Kipling never got anywhere near Mandalay. One would love to hear more about the mysterious, if irrelevant, Olive Yang, described by Thant as a "bisexual warlady" who developed a tough reputation while still at convent school, where she was rumored to carry a revolver in her handbag. Thant needs to release his inner Paul Theroux more often.
Burmese independence came, of course, as an afterthought to India's -- yet another insult dealt by history. Almost nothing has gone right since. Civil war, the military takeover of the government and a ruinous attempt to create a unique brand of Burmese socialism have brought Burma to its knees.
Thant eloquently and mournfully recites the dismal history of the last half century and, in analyzing the country's nascent democracy movement, holds out only the slimmest of hopes for a better future. It will not come through economic and diplomatic sanctions, of that he is convinced. Trade and more engagement, especially more tourism, might let in badly needed light and air. But trying to topple the regime by isolating it would, he argues, be disastrous.
"Much more than any part of Burmese society," he writes, "the army will weather another 40 years of isolation just fine."
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