Burma

Not Out of Hate
A Novel of Burma
By Ma Ma Lay
· Edited by William H. Frederick
· Translation by Margaret Aung-Thwin
· Introduction by Anna Allott
· Afterword by Robert E. Vore

Ma Ma Lay’s 1955 novel of the marriage between a rural teenager to a powerful Anglophile twenty years her senior, set in prewar Burma, is an engaging drama, finely observed work of social realism, and stirring rejection of Western cultural dominance by Burma’s foremost female author and one of its preeminent voices for change.

The Return of the Galon King
History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial Burma
By Maitrii Aung-Thwin

In late 1930, on a secluded mountain overlooking the rural paddy fields of British Burma, a peasant leader named Saya San crowned himself King and inaugurated a series of uprisings that would later erupt into one of the largest anti-colonial rebellions in Southeast Asian history.

Wartime in Burma
A Diary, January to June 1942
By Theippan Maung Wa
· Edited by L. E. Bagshawe and Anna Allott

This diary, begun after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and covering the invasion of Burma up to June 1942, is a moving account of the dilemmas faced by the well-loved and prolific Burmese author Theippan Maung Wa (a pseudonym of U Sein Tin) and his family. At the time of the Japanese invasion, U Sein Tin was deputy secretary in the Ministry of Home and Defense Affairs.

Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement
Buddhism and the Cultural Construction of Power
By Ingrid Jordt

Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement: Buddhism and the Cultural Construction of Power describes a transformation in Buddhist practice in contemporary Burma. This revitalization movement has had real consequences for how the oppressive military junta, in power since the early 1960s, governs the country.Drawing

Myth and History in the Historiography of Early Burma
Paradigms, Primary Sources, and Prejudices
By Michael A. Aung-Thwin

After careful re-reading and analysis of original Old Burmese and other primary sources, the author discovered that four out of the five events considered to be the most important in the history of early Burma, and believed to have been historically accurate, are actually late-nineteenth and twentieth-century inventions of colonial historians caught in their own intellectual and political world.Only