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Autobiographical history
The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma
Over the years before Thant came to Cambridge, he had served in a number of UN peacekeeping operations, and had contributed towards bringing awareness and support for the serious Burma issues for the Human Rights Watch. He had studied at Harvard and the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, before taking up his studies at Cambridge. He later worked for the UN in Phnom Penh, in Sarajevo, and then in the UN Secretary’s office on UN reform issues. Equipped as he is with an international perspective, Thant has given an eye-opening and a polemical story of his land in his very accessible book The River of Lost Footsteps, an account stretching from Burma’s flourishing economy and a democratic society to the longest dictatorship in contemporary history. But early on in 1988, during the pro-democracy agitation in Burma, he lent his whole-hearted support for Burmese refugees, working around the clock on the Burmese-Thai border. This explains his deep-seated interest in the modern history of Burma on which he has written his rather personal narrative which is poignant because it involves the experience and involvement of an insider. Another of his books, The Making of Modern Burma was written almost six years before The River of Lost Footsteps. Thant’s involvement in his homeland is apparent in the Preface where he looks back on his days in the US, but feels a sense of joy at being present in his country: “The late morning hikes to lecture through the New England snow … the long conversations over starchy dining hall meals, the spring garden parties, my friends off to medical school or their first jobs on Wall Street all seemed many worlds away. But at least for a little while I felt a sense of purpose, a sense that I was at the right place doing the right thing.” His home is a far cry from university life in the west from where he graduated in 1988. Sitting now in a base camp in the mountains, he teams up with “others of similar conviction.” The personal become the political in a narrative that intertwines his family history with that of the history of his country. Thant has always stood against sanctions which he feels have failed to bring about any compromise on the part of the military dictatorship which seems to have turned more stubborn instead. Sanctions would have helped if the military in Burma had any intention of transacting with the outer world. He is quite logical in arguing that the problem of Burma has been the isolation that it has existed in for the last many decades. All efforts have failed to initiate an environment of freedom and justice or the drive to create state institutions as well as encourage tourism that would allow the nation to come out of its shell where it can very easily continue to exist for another century. The warrior mentality inherited from the pre-colonial period lives on and is responsible for the civil upheavals that punctuate Burma’s history. The River of Lost Footsteps takes up various political arguments, but more than these it describes the horror of violence and the incessant killings that make its history. The book is a sad account of Burma’s history from the period of colonialism when the British removed its monarch and made Burma a province of India thus cutting it from its heritage. The story moves to the occupation of Burma by the Japanese during World War II and then more than half a century of civil war that still rages in the country. Many heroes and princes have risen, but only briefly to be replaced by others. Thant’s book is almost a eulogy to these “lost footsteps” that have now passed into oblivion. Moreover, for Thant, it is a passion to write about his country because till now the ‘”analysis of Burma has been singularly ahistorical.” It succeeds in its revisionist intentions of driving home to the Western readers the multifaceted histories of Burma.
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I had already left Trinity College when Thant Myint-U arrived there to take up his research for a doctorate. But we as graduates had already been keenly debating the future of democracy in Burma (now Myanmar) and of course its history. I was to go on to Oxford where my interest in Burmese politics received another fillip from the presence of Aung San Suu Kyi’s husband, Michael Aris, who was a Fellow at the same university.
