Ludu Daw Amar

Ludu Daw Amar (also Ludu Daw Ah Mar; လူထုဒေါ်အမာ, ; 29 November 1915 – 7 April 2008) was a well known and respected leading dissident writer and journalist in Mandalay, Burma.

She was married to fellow writer and journalist Ludu U Hla and was the mother of popular writer Nyi Pu Lay.

She is best known for her outspoken anti-government views and radical left wing journalism besides her outstanding work on traditional Burmese arts, theatre, dance and music, and several works of translation from English, both fiction and non-fiction.

Born into an old established Mandalay family that traded in tobacco and manufactured cheroots, Amar was the fourth in a family of twelve, of whom only six survived to adulthood.

and 33rd, and always open to such visitors, was often their first port of call in Mandalay.

When the second university students strike in history broke out in 1936, Amar and her friend from Mandalay M.A. Ma Ohn became famous as women student leaders among the strikers camped out on the terraces of the Shwedagon Pagoda.

Her first notable work was a translation of Trials in Burma by Maurice Collis in 1938, and by that time she was already published in the university's Owei (MY အိုးဝေ, Peacock's Call) magazine, and also Kyipwa Yay (MY ကြီးပွားရေးမဂ္ဂဇင်း, Progress) magazine, run by her future husband U Hla, under her own name as well as the pen names Mya Myint Zu and Khin La Win.

U Hla was a staunch supporter of the strike and started courting Amar; in 1939 they got married and U Hla moved his magazine to Mandalay.

When the peace talks broke down, Amar's oldest son Soe Win (b. 1941), aged 22 and a student leader at Rangoon University, went underground with a few others to join the Communist Party of Burma.

The family fled to the countryside north of Mandalay when the Second World War broke out in the East in 1942, but the magazine continued to come out.

Daw Amar translated one of the three wartime bestsellers of the Japanese soldier writer Hino Ashihei called Wheat and Soldiers (MY ဂျုံနှင့်စစ်သား, ) and published it together with the other two translated by her husband.

She also translated The Rainbow (MY သက်တံရောင်, Thettant yaung) by the Czechoslovak writer Wanda Wasilewska in 1945, printed on blue matchbox wrapping paper, the only kind of paper available at the time.

Both husband and wife became involved in the Resistance movement against the Japanese Occupation, and formed the Asha Lu Nge (MY အာရှလူငယ်, Asia Youth) organisation in Mandalay.

Her husband was arrested briefly by the military authorities after the recapture of the city by the British Fourteenth Army on account of the Hino Ashihei books.

At the end of the war in 1945 U Hla launched a fortnightly paper called the Ludu Journal (MY လူထုဂျာနယ်) - Ludu is Burmese for 'the people/masses' - with Amar as his assistant editor.

The Ludu Daily was successfully launched the following year and the couple subsequently came to be known as Ludu U Hla and Ludu Daw Amar.

Their incisive political commentaries and analyses made a significant contribution to the country's yearning for independence and unified struggle against colonial rule.

Their publications had never carried advertisements for alcohol, drugs to enhance sexual performance or gambling, nor racing tips, salacious affairs and gossip.

U Hla had to be persuaded to make an exception of film advertisements for the survival of the paper.

Their second son Po Than Gyaung (b. 1945) was also arrested for alleged clandestine student political activities at Mandalay University in July 1966, aged 21, and detained without charge or trial until May 1972.

He spent part of his imprisonment in Mandalay Prison and later on Cocos Island Penal Colony in the Andaman Sea.

They were personally known to Ne Win from the early days, and the latter often called at their place whenever he visited Mandalay.

They carried on with writing, researching, organising literary seminars, giving talks and publishing material other than domestic politics, and remained active in social and community affairs.

She was educated at the American Baptist Mission School and subsequently the National High School under the headmaster Abdul Razak who later became the Education Minister in Aung San's cabinet and was assassinated with him and others in July 1947.

She read science at the Mandalay Intermediate College and went on to Rangoon University for a bachelor's degree.

One morning in 1948, soon after Burma gained her independence from Britain, however, the Kyipwa Yay Press in Mandalay was dynamited to rubble by government troops who were angry that the Ludu couple appeared to be sympathetic to the Communists.

This was a time when regime change happened quite often with the city falling into the hands, in turn, of the Karen rebels, Communists and the new Socialist government under U Nu.

The entire family, including two pregnant women, was thrown out into the street, lined up and was about to be gunned down when a number of monks and locals successfully intervened to save their lives.

They had five children by now, with the youngest Nyein Chan ( his given name means 'peace' in Burmese, pseudonym Nyi Pu Lay b. 1952) barely a toddler.

In 1953 Amar travelled abroad to the World Democratic Women's Conference in Copenhagen, World Peace Conference in Budapest, and 4th World Festival of Youth and Students in Bucharest.

In October 1953 the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League (AFPFL) government of U Nu imprisoned U Hla under Section 5 for sedition as a political prisoner after publishing a controversial news story in the paper and he spent over three years in Rangoon's Central Jail until his release in January 1957.

In March 1959 the paper was sealed off by the authorities, and it did not come out again until May the next year.

Amar travelled to Moscow in 1962 as an invited guest by Aeroflot Russian Airlines and visited East Germany, Czechoslovakia and China.

U Hla and Daw Amar were well known to foreign students of Burmese as well as Burmese writers, journalists and artists; the younger generation of budding writers and artists called them 'U-Lay' (Uncle) and 'Daw Daw' (Aunty).

The paper had openly championed for peace and a socialist society, and came out very strongly in support of the peace parley in 1963 between the Revolutionary Council government of Ne Win and various insurgent groups, both Communist and ethnic, just as they had done before in the early years of the civil war in the 1950s.

The Ludu Daily was closed down by the military government on July 7, 1967.

He was killed in a bloody purge in 1967 in the jungles of Bago Yoma mountains when the CPB carried out its own cultural revolution.

The Ludu couple, true to Burmese Buddhist attitude to death, declined an invitation from the authorities to visit their first born's jungle grave.

In 1975 they accepted the government's invitation to give talks to university students from both Mandalay and Rangoon taking part in the reconstruction of the temples in Bagan damaged by the great earthquake of the same year.

Their home, Ludu Taik (Ludu House) on 84th.