Anna Allott pictured with literary critic Aung Thinn and writer Mya Than Tint in Yangon in the 1990s. (Supplied)

The accidental Burmese scholar: Remembering Anna Allott

OBITUARY

Anna Joan Allott, who died last month aged 93, spent half a century schooling British diplomats in the Burmese language and studying its grammar, but her relationship with Myanmar started almost by accident.

By VICKY BOWMAN | FRONTIER

In 1952, the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies appointed Anna to work on a Burmese-English dictionary. The dictionary never saw the light of day, but the 22-year-old would acquire a lifelong commitment to Myanmar, then called Burma, and its language, literature and people.

She passed this commitment on to me, when I was lucky enough to learn Burmese from her at SOAS in October 1989, prior to my posting as second secretary at the British embassy in Yangon. She had been prepping British diplomats in the language since 1957; after their initial postings, several of them would, like me, end up returning to the country as ambassadors. She taught many other well-known names in Myanmar studies, including Professor David Steinberg of Georgetown University.

Anna Sargant, as she was known before marrying, had not intended to study Burmese and had no family connections to Burma. After an undergraduate degree in French and Russian at the London School of Slavonic Studies, she moved to the nearby SOAS, where linguistics professor JR Firth tasked her with studying Chinese phonetics. But when promised funding did not materialise, SOAS reassigned Anna to update the seminal 1852 Burmese-English dictionary compiled by Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson, despite her being new to the language. For the raw material, the University of Rangoon had bequeathed to SOAS a corpus of Burmese literature and around half a million accompanying word slips collected since 1924 by the Burma Research Society.

Around that time, Anna met Antony Allott, an expert in African law at SOAS, whom she married in November 1952. She shifted to studying Burmese under HF Searle, a former member of the colonial Indian Civil Service, and U Hla Pe, SOAS’s lecturer in Burmese. She later wrote that after a year of studying “a pretty difficult language spoken in a country that I had never even thought about”, she could “read, and utter a few simple sentences in Burmese but certainly could not claim to be able to speak the language”.

I felt the same after six months learning Burmese with Anna and “BBC” U Khin, a former senior official in the Burmese ministry of information who moved to Britain and worked for the national broadcaster. It was he who gave Anna her Monday-born Burmese name, Khin Khin Chaw.

Anna had taken me systematically through the Burmese alphabet, since it was her strict policy that students learn the script from day one. Both to explain points of grammar and offer insights into the deprivations of socialist Burma, she based her teaching materials on correspondence from Burmese friends. Before long, I was reading letters from Aung Thinn, a literary critic who Anna had met in Rangoon in 1976, and his daughter Maw Maw Thinn.

Aung Thinn had introduced Anna to the world of haw-pyaw-bwe or literary talks, which she loved attending. Many of the speakers were writers and she would translate their short stories for anthologies of Southeast Asian literature, while also using them as teaching material. The first one she gave me was TV-sickness by Ma Sanda. This started us on a collaboration that resulted in a 1993 publication by free expression advocacy group PEN America, Inked Over, Ripped Out, a translated volume of stories censored by the then-junta. The stories were collected for us by Dr Ma Thida (Sanchaung), a surgeon, writer and political dissident whom I first met in Rangoon in 1991, and who went on to found Myanmar PEN in 2013 during a period of greater freedom.

Before the dictionary could be completed, it was superseded by a new dictionary compiled by the Myanmar Language Commission, published in Yangon in 1993. However, Anna continued lecturing and researching at SOAS. In 2001 she co-authored a Burmese (Myanmar) Dictionary of Grammatical Forms with her colleague Professor John Okell, who died in 2020 (read Frontier’s obituary). And despite her own dictionary project falling through, she ensured that the Bwe-Karen dictionary by her SOAS colleague Eugenie Henderson was posthumously published in 1997.

Anna’s interest in Burmese grammar deepened when she first visited Burma, travelling by sea in October 1953 for nine months’ Overseas Study Leave. In Rangoon, she discussed grammar three times a week with the founder and chair of the Burma Research Society, Professor Pe Maung Tin, who had recently published a book on Burmese syntax.

On that trip she also fell in love with Mandalay. It was with some trepidation that she took her first ever flight on 12 January 1954, in a rickety Dakota from Rangoon to Mandalay, having been advised to avoid the train due to the armed insurgencies that had broken out shortly after Burma’s independence in 1948. The former royal capital was known for its unique spoken language, which Anna called “exquisite”, making it a good place to immerse oneself. She stayed with the Toke-galay family in a house in Mandalay’s Civil Lines, formerly a residential quarter for British colonial officials. The household was run by three unmarried sisters who became her teachers, Ma Ma Gyi, Ma Ma Lay and Khin Shwe Mar. One of their great-uncles had been an ambassador to France from the court of King Mindon, who ruled in the mid-19th century.

Anna with Ludu U Hla and Ludu Daw Ama in Mandalay in 1977. (Supplied)

Five decades later, in November 2005, Anna was looking forward to attending the 90th birthday in Mandalay of left-wing writer Ludu Daw Ama, whom she had first met in 1976 together with her husband Ludu U Hla, also a well-known author. I was then the British ambassador to Myanmar, and both Anna and I were invited to speak at the event, which brought together hundreds of writers, literature enthusiasts and activists. But despite Anna having a visa, the military regime blocked her at the Yangon airport and sent her back to London. It later emerged that she had been blacklisted for helping a French journalist on a previous visit. A change of regime allowed her to make a last trip to the country in 2014, 60 years after her initial visit, and stay with me in Yangon.

Had Anna attended Ludu Daw Ama’s birthday, she would doubtless have been reminded about remarks she had made 20 years earlier. She had caused a stir in an interview in a Burmese magazine, by noting that well-known Burmese writers commonly plagiarised European authors. In particular, she called out popular satirist Thawdar Swe for his uncredited adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpel the Fool. Aung Hla Tun recalls this leading to heated arguments at the board of Sarpay Beikman, the state publishing house, where the veteran journalist was an editor.

It was typical of Anna to be principled and direct. Maw Maw Thinn said of her after her death, “She never messed about. She was straightforward. And she helped people.” Decades of Burmese dictatorship inspired Anna to promote freedom of expression through her translation work. Besides her contribution to the PEN America volume, she was an advisor to the Burma Archive, an Open Society Foundation-funded project that, among other things, collected the uncensored writing produced in the month before the September 1988 coup.

But Anna also drew on her mother’s Czech roots. She admired the Charter 77 human rights movement and Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, while seeing parallels between the Prague Spring and Myanmar’s 1988 uprising. She was particularly wedded to her remoska, an early form of the airfryer, invented in the mid 1950s by a Czech engineer.

The life of her mother Marie was a source of inspiration in itself. She had been the first girl to attend the all-male gymnasium in Boskovice, Czechoslovakia. While pursuing a PhD in French literature at Bordeaux University, she met her first husband Thomas Sargant, who later co-founded the human rights organisation JUSTICE. They married in London in 1929 and Anna was born there on September 22 the following year, followed in 1933 by her sister Naomi, who became a distinguished educationalist. Divorced in 1936, Marie later found a job as a French teacher in a London school and worked for the Czech government-in-exile during the Second World War. When she got remarried to Oxford-based Czech Egyptologist Jaroslav Černý, Anna acquired a philologist for a stepfather.

Awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1998 for “services to British-Burmese relations”, Anna was secretary of the Britain-Burma Society from 1980 to 1997. From 2002 to 2016 she was a trustee of Prospect Burma, which provides overseas scholarships to Myanmar students. The charity was established with funds from the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize given to her friend Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who had studied at SOAS from 1985 to 1987. Anna would always welcome Myanmar visitors to her house in Bodicote, Oxfordshire, and she continued to do this after moving to Wedmore, Somerset, following the death of her husband in 2002.

Anna died on April 13 this year in Somerset, aged 93. She is survived by two sons and two daughters, 10 grandchildren and seven great grandchildren.

Vicky Bowman CMG has been director of the Myanmar Centre for Responsible Business since 2013. She was second secretary to the British Embassy in Yangon from 1990 to 1993 and ambassador from 2002 to 2006. Her translated short stories and poetry include oral histories collected by Mya Than Tint, published as ‘On the Road to Mandalay’.

More stories

Latest Issue

Stories in this issue
Myanmar enters 2021 with more friends than foes
The early delivery of vaccines is one of the many boons of the country’s geopolitics, but to really take advantage, Myanmar must bury the legacy of its isolationist past.
Will the Kayin BGF go quietly?
The Kayin State Border Guard Force has come under intense pressure from the Tatmadaw over its extensive, controversial business interests and there’s concern the ultimatum could trigger fresh hostilities in one of the country’s most war-torn areas.

Support our independent journalism and get exclusive behind-the-scenes content and analysis

Stay on top of Myanmar current affairs with our Daily Briefing and Media Monitor newsletters.

Sign up for our Frontier Fridays newsletter. It’s a free weekly round-up featuring the most important events shaping Myanmar