By Sasha Glim

A story about a 12-year-old Nepalese girl who brings Tibetan Buddhism to Burma (now Myanmar) went viral in the early 1960s and became a symbol of women’s empowerment, says Christoph Emmrich, associate professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto.

Christoph Emmrich, an associate professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto, recently spoke to a UCSB audience about the fictional retellings of Dhammawati Guruma’s life as a Buddhist teacher.

Emmrich recently gave a talk to UC Santa Barbara students and faculty about Beloved Daughter, the fictionalized retelling of the life story of actual Buddhist teacher, Dhammawati Guruma, focusing on the first iteration of the story titled Thamichit. 

The novel, by Burmese author Rawe Thun, is based on a true story, following the adolescent Ganesh Kumari through harrowing adventures, ending with her eventually gaining her monastic name: Dhammawati, and receiving several prestigious awards. 

“It makes her a national celebrity, and launches her as a future missionary. The epilogue sees Dhammawati return to Nepal to help bring true Buddhism from Burma to her home country, which embraces her as her family’s — as well as Nepal’s and Burma’s —beloved daughter,” Emmrich said.

His talk was hosted by Rory Lindsay, a visiting scholar at the 84000 Buddhist Texts Translation Initiative, a global collaborative effort housed in UCSB’s Religious Studies department. “The 84000 project aims to translate the entire Tibetan Buddhist canon into English over a period of 100 years. We are about 15 years in, and we are actually on track,” Lindsay said. In addition to the Translation Initiative, other sponsors of the event included the IHC’s South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group and Translation Studies at UCSB. 

Emmrich described the 1963 novel as “a slim volume,” in which the plot is quickly told. “Ganesh Kumari Shakya is a precocious Nepalese adolescent of 14 years, who lives in the city of Latitpur, Nepal. As she attends a sermon delivered by a visiting Burmese monk with her mother, she gets hooked on the idea of studying Buddhism in Burma,” he said. 

The novel follows Ganesh Kumari until she is ultimately recognized and celebrated for her teachings. “It is a mix of the unconformist, superhuman, the gender bending, and the exotic. Dhammawati as a literary figure and from the perspective of western literature comes to be located somewhere between Pippi Longstocking of the global south, and Kipling’s Burma girl in the reverse,” he said.

While Dhammawati was well-known, she became even more famous with the publication of Rawe Thun’s work. “It is reported that Rawe Thun was flabbergasted when his novel, within just a few years after publication, became what we call viral,” Emmrich said. “He had written a bestseller, or a best lender, that would see multiple reprints and editions, which young women and friends would circulate among each other, and would become one of the preferred gifts of monastic women teachers to their students,” he said.

The story supported education and other social services in a dramatically impoverished country with a fading infrastructure and corrupt bureaucracy, Emmrich said. The desperate need for basic schooling among the rural poor and an increased interest in meditation among the lower and lower-middle classes helped create the demand for inspirational reading, he explained.

Yet Rawe Thun had only barely interacted with Dhammawati before publishing his novel. “Dhammawati told me that Rawe Thun and she did not talk much. Instead Rawe Thun had read a piece about her, little more than a bio profile,” he said. The bio profile was written for the examination system, Emmrich explained.

Cover of the book Beloved Daughter, the fictionalized retelling of the life story of actual Buddhist teacher, Dhammawati Guruma.

Several translations of Dhammawati’s story followed Rawe Thun’s version. “In 1999, Dhammawati’s younger brother Motikaji Shakya wrote out his Nepali translation,” Emmrich said. “It was only through her brother that she could allow the text, which had originated with her, to be again as much about herself as possible and to be permeated by devotion and authenticity that was no longer controlled and mediated by the Burmese examination system or by a Burmese novelist man,” he said.

The English translation was less a direct translation than a transformation, Emmrich said. “Beloved Daughter has shifted from dealing with a text as a text, to primarily dealing with a figure, a plot, and a message,” he said. 

“The message is that of the empowered girl, of girl power, an idea so cutting edge in the 1910s Anglophone world,” he said. “Beloved Daughter came out in 2016, and that by now feels to some of us, so very 2010s. Young women intellectuals today look back at that time as the heyday of what they now sarcastically call the corporate girly.”

The way the protagonist herself is creatively approving and encouraging new retellings of her life story is rare, and the texts are already becoming a collective work, Emmrich said.  Emmrich spoke with Dhammawati about her opinion on the novels not being a biographical work. “I addressed the issue of genre and she didn’t see the difference between a biographical story and a novel,” he said. “She’s thinking about the effect it has on the readers.”

Emmrich's next book, titled Writing Rites for Newar Girls: Marriage and Menarche according to Kathmandu Valley Manuals, will be coming out soon.

Sasha Glim is a fourth year English major and Professional Writing minor at UC Santa Barbara. She is a Web and Social Media intern with the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.