This is one of the most important books on colonial Burma to have emerged in the last century. It addresses aspects of modernity originating with certain categories of local women, thus altering the male-dominated past; furthermore, it is derived from indigenous sources as well as colonial records, going beyond the archives of British Burma to reinstate a sense of agency and dynamism with which to counter notions of colonial passivity. Ikeya states in the beginning that her study will ‘broaden the understanding of colonialism and modernity in Burma beyond the level of politics and enable a fundamental revision of the reigning nationalist and anticolonial master narratives of political culture and society in colonial Burma’ (p. 4), and she does not disappoint the reader.
This is the first in a triumvirate of scholarly works on women in Burma to emerge more or less simultaneously (the others are Jessica Harriden, The authority of influence: Women and power in Burmese history [Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2012] and Tharaphi Than, Women of modern Burma [London: Routledge, 2013]). One is a longue durée perspective (unsettling to North American-trained historians who are encouraged to direct their focus narrowly but with depth) that necessarily has a broader purview than the current work under review, and the other has not been released; yet their existence shows that there has been a momentum building over the past decade to augment the history of women in Burma from ‘a footnote in the official nationalist Burmese history’ (p. 4). Ikeya has achieved exactly that with Reconfiguring women. Those of us who engage with themes of gender in Southeast Asian and world history more broadly in our teaching have been hard-pressed for material for Burma with which to oppose the dominant trope of male nationalist heroism. For this reason, Ikeya has carried out a great service to the profession in conceiving of and writing this book. Throughout the carefully researched and engagingly written monograph, the roles that women played in consuming and performing modernity — as ‘khit kala, “women of the times”’ (p. 2), known by various names, not all of them complimentary — are located, examined, explained, and restored to history. In so doing, the idea of the Burmese incompatibility with ‘foreignness’ is exposed as a fallacy and Furnivall's ‘plural society’ becomes too simplistic (p. 5).
Chapter 1 provides the historical context for the British takeover of Burma whilst stressing the precolonial cosmopolitan nature of the coastal areas and regional economic integration already in place. A key emphasis is the demographic breakdown for immigration into urban areas and where the migrants came from. This provides an excellent overview of a diverse population that was predominantly composed of male immigrants — and the local women whose partners they became. There is also a taste of the consumption of foreign products by Burmese women as a consequence. Chapter 2 tackles the question of ‘high status’ versus autonomy and analyses the degree to which women in colonial Burma could access education and political agency. It goes further, however, in identifying how an educated woman could nurture more engaged Burmese citizens and provide evidence for a modern nation. Ikeya cleverly uses print media for attitudes toward education and political participation in this chapter. Chapter 3 shows how women were encouraged to participate in political life in the 1920s and 1930s, through women's associations as well as collective action based upon class and ethnicity.
Chapter 4 is primarily about ‘new bodily practices and conspicuous consumerism’ (p. 97) for themselves — in the case of the khit hsan thu, or fashionable women — and their families, by responsible housewives and mothers. Fashion as a mode of signalling rejection of or adherence to tradition was just as much of an issue in Burma as in India, with similar social consequences. Thus the length of a longyi, the choice of whether to wear eingyi pa (a blouse of transparent fabric such as muslin or silk), make-up, or the sadohn (chignon hairstyle) daringly positioned at the back of the head were decisions that had real outcomes for one's social categorisation. Similarly, women were beset with a bewilderingly wide array of preparations, powders, and tonics with which they were expected to bathe, sanitise, and medicate their families and their domestic environments. As Ikeya says in one passage, ‘consumption of Sunlight Soap has made the family and their home cleaner, healthier, happier, and more respectable’ (p. 115).
Chapter 5 addresses the problematic issue of marriage and more temporary relationships between local women and foreign men, and the status of the children from these unions. Ikeya concludes that ‘intermarriage became a powerful symbol of disloyalty … [and] colonialism reinforced already existing indigenous understandings of intermarriage as unacceptable’ (p. 142). Chapter 6 analyses the khit hsan thu as object of censorious attacks in print media and, therefore, how the ‘modern’ woman occupied an ambiguous place in Burmese society, at once a showcase for Burma's ‘progress’ and its downfall into moral deficiency as traditions were sacrificed in favour of consumption and exhibition. This occurred, Ikeya explains, so as to ‘remasculinise Burmese men’ (p. 162), undermined by the colonial project. The conclusion contains a section on the legacy of a male, nationalist history for the Burma juxtaposed against Aung San Suu Kyi as the symbol for a free and fair future, emphasising the derogatory tropes employed by the government in power to reduce her agency on the grounds of her gender.
Scholars of modern Burmese politics, history, economics, cultural studies, and language and literature will find this book essential reading. More broadly, students and specialists of colonialism, Buddhist studies, and gender history will find it an excellent addition to their libraries. Historians of Southeast Asia: this is one of those books that you simply must acquire. It is a superb book, meticulously researched, elegantly written, and passionately argued. Ikeya has successfully complicated how we must consider modernity in Burma, the relationship between modernity and colonialism, and, most significantly, the gendered nature of modernity and its colonial discourses.
