Women Warriors in Southeast Asia ed. by Vina A. Lanzona and Frederik Rettig (review)

With women warriors in Southeast Asia as its subject, this edited volume would immediately interest those keen to welcome new dimensions to the histories of the region and the societies and polities within it, a defining feature of which is now recognised as being the relatively egalitarian male-female relations before the colonial era.

The 13 essays take the reader on an ‘almost 1,500-year-long journey’ with chronological demarcations: the ancient and early modern, the modern period, and the Security Sector Reform of the United Nations in Cambodia and East Timor.

The gallery of women warriors start in the 6th century with a historical Nan Yue woman warrior who pacified her people into accepting Chinese rule (Geoff Wade), and ends in East Timor, where Jacqueline A Siapno has documented former combatant women denied funded medical care living with bullet wounds still lodged in their bodies.

The chapters on the whole impress with their meticulous research. Some have debuted as conference panels organised by the editors in 2006. Others have already been published or are drawn from lengthier works.

The intervening years could have led the editors to develop ideas and concepts on how women warriors could be studied, be it the reading of source materials or exploring the conditions of the everyday life as warrior women, a critical term used in Barbara W Andaya’s concluding chapter. However, they have chosen to “engage with empirical issues first in order to build a solid base before moving on the more theoretical/discursive conceptual approaches”.

The primacy given to the ‘empirical’ may account for some chapters reading like ‘factual’ accounts. According to her, Ann Kumar’s two 1980 articles on the prajurit estri covering the religious, social and economic life of the Javanese court, and the political dealings with the Dutch in the late 18th century remains her most popular work. Her chapter is an account based on the diary entries of a high-born warrior on the “extremely protracted chess game” played by three rulers of Javanese royal houses and the Dutch. We thus learn that the prajurit estri was also an accomplished political commentator. Readers should delve into the 1980 articles to understand the enduring popularity of her earlier articles.

The emphasis on the ‘facts’ but not their production, circulation and contestation with other narratives leaves us with a handy introductory history book with room for students to critique the chapters and also to read them intertextually in terms of methodology, framework and analysis.

In the Introduction, the editors paired chapters to highlight cross-country comparative possibilities. Pairing the Rani of Jhansi regiment (Tobias Rettig) with the women in the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) (Agnes Khoo) as ethnic minorities however is problematic. The Indian National Army was purely out to liberate India from British rule while the MCP joined the British to fight the Japanese. It was outlawed again after the war and fought to liberate Malaya from colonialism, laying down arms only in 1989.

Agnes Khoo’s 2007 collection of oral histories with MCP women could be read alongside Vina A Lanzona’s on women in the Huk rebellion (1942–1956) on love and sex as life-stories. Teofista Valerio married her commander when she joined the Communist Party of the Philippines in World War II, without expectations that they would live as a ‘normal couple’. They were separated for decades, mainly serving long prison sentences. She heard that he had remarried and had four children but was relieved and proud to learn that she was the only woman he ever married, though he was “really married to the revolution.”

Women Warriors in Southeast Asia alerts us to how much more work needs to be done on the subject.