Book Review – Aung San Suu Kyi : A Biography, Jesper Bengtsson

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Aung San Suu Kyi – one of the most eminent, yet least popular feminine personalities in the world. Someone that has spent a major part of her life in house arrest, fighting for the cause of democracy in her homeland, spoken on par with Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, she always remained a personality that I wanted to know more about.

With so much of interest did I pick the book ‘Aung San Suu Kyi: A Biography’, by Jesper Bengtsson. But, as it is always said, the more you expect, the more you get disappointed. This book is a disappointment, in the sense that what you get is not a coherent, comprehensive biography, but rather what looks like a hastily compiled bunch of standalone essays.

The author himself makes an excuse at the very beginning stating that this is not a comprehensive biography of Aung San, due to her isolation from the world, being in house arrest. However, isn’t that what the challenge of representing such a personality is about?!

He has done a basic ground work, meeting a lot of her supporters, relatives, party people, contemporaries and opponents. But he has failed miserably in putting it all together in a manner that befits a biography of such a persona. The books jumps here and there and with so many spelling and grammatical errors, makes one wonder whether one should have explored better before deciding on the right book to read about Aung San.

There are some serious lacunae in the book with only patchy information filling up for the serious details. When he ends the chapter about her family life in London - before she ended up arriving at Burma in 1988 and donning the mantle of a national leader – he mentions that she would have remained on the path to her goal of becoming a successful author/academician, if not for the phone call on the last day of March 1988. But neither before this mention, not after that, does he explain or elaborate as to who made the phone call or what was the phone call all about.

Also, the most critical event in the life of Aung San Suu Kyi, which resulted in her becoming a national leader of the Burmese, is her talk in the Shwedagon Pagoda in August 1988. But sadly, the book has no proper information on such a crucial and watershed event in her life. Now, imagine reading the biography of Mahatma Gandhi without any information about his works in South Africa or that of Mother Teresa without any information about her early struggles in the streets of Kolkatta!

My view is that if you are keen on reading about Aung San Suu Kyi and her struggle for the Burmese Democracy, this is not the book to read!

Ashok Krishna