Among a number of writings by journalists and political analysts on Benazir Bhutto, Anna Suvorova's book on her is a rare scholarly account of the life and legacy of the only female prime minister of Pakistan. This well documented book is partly based on Suvorova's personal interviews with people who surrounded Benazir Bhutto as her friends or colleagues, which adds living, characteristic features to her ‘multidimensional portrait’ skillfully ‘painted’ by the researcher.
In the Acknowledgements to her book, Suvorova writes that her portrait of Benazir Bhutto arose through a ‘slow’ or ‘focused’ reading of Bhutto's own books, articles and speeches, which uncovers unexpected aspects of her motives and behaviour. It is precisely for this reason that Suvorova defines her book as an anthropological portrait, a picture that is multidimensional, like “the works of certain European Old Masters, who depicted their subjects in full face, profile and three-quarter views on a single canvas” (p. x). Suvorova's goal was to follow the chain formed by living history, individual biography, autobiography, and cultural myth. Although Bhutto seems to never distort confirmed facts in her books, the emphases, repetitions, omissions and interpretations of these facts had been a product of her self-reflection and make it possible to read much between the lines. In Suvorova's opinion, “Benazir's destiny bears the undeniable mark of mystery – an ineffable duality of myth that will never be exhausted by the recollections of eyewitnesses. There is, above all, the mystery of her personality, which one can begin to uncover only by attentively reading her own words” (p. xi).
Suvorova's quest has culminated in an impressive narrative of Benazir Bhutto's life, published first in Russian and now in English. It is an insightful and moving account, highlighting both the highs and lows of Benazir's political and personal career and putting her life in the context of her Sindhi background, her sibling position in her family and also her woman status in a male-dominated Muslim society. The book also presents a remarkable and comprehensive account of a complex political situation of Pakistan under its female Muslim leader in the modern political world, thus providing Suvorova's portrait of her heroine with the appropriate background. Alongside all this Suvorova's book is a good and stimulating read, it can undoubtedly be recommended to both specialists in the Pakistan politics and non-specialists interested in Asian studies.
Belonging to the ilk of such non-specialists (in this case South-East Asianists), the author of these lines, even if he greatly enjoyed Suvorova's book, would have never taken a risk to write a review of it in a scholarly journal. There is however an issue of general value that probably justifies his encroachment on the ‘foreign territory’. The point is that, in Suvorova's own words, her portrait of Benazir Bhutto is not so much political as anthropological. This allows Suvorova to choose the phenomenon of female political leadership widely spread in South Asia as one of the major subjects of her book. This phenomenon was also well known in Asia, in the Malay-Indonesian world in particular. There were two most formidable queens in Majapahit, the greatest state of Java in the fourteenth century. The chain of four queens reigned in Aceh and the chain equal in length in Patani of the seventeenth century. Only special fatwas from Mecca were powerful enough to break these chains. In the late twenties–early twenty-first century Corazon Aquino and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo were presidents of the Philippines and Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia. Thus, the problem of female political leadership is not foreign for South-East Asianists either, and Suvorova's attempts to suggest the ways of its interpretation deserve their attention and, therefore, its retelling by the reviewer, even if non-professional.
In the twentieth century more than twenty women had been either presidents or prime ministers of their country. One third of them have held the office of prime minister in South Asia. Widely known and reported upon are Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the world's first female prime minister, who headed the Sri Lankan government, and Indira Gandhi who held the same position in India. More recent are Benazir Bhutto, prime minister of Pakistan, Sheikh Hasina Wajeed and Khaleda Zia, holders of the same position in Bangladesh, and Chandrika Kumaratunga, Sri Lankan prime minister. The fact that the countries where governments or opposition movements have been led by women are widely considered patriarchal and paternalistic in character and male competitors have been around to challenge the women's ascendancy to a political position makes the phenomenon even more intriguing.
Women in South Asia lead governments and opposition movements in their countries independently of the level of their economic development as well as cultural and religious differences. Most surprising – given widespread stereotypes about Islam – is female leadership in the heavily populated Muslim states like Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Turkey. There is no doubt that the rise of female leaders is linked to their being members of prominent families: they are all the daughters or widows of former government heads or leading oppositionists. These women share dynastic origins and ‘inherited’ political leadership. As a general phenomenon political dynasties are not unusual. Less usual are women as the beneficiaries of their family's political inheritance. It is not just a ‘shortage’ of men that leads women to be selected as successors within the family, but also their ability to symbolize alternatives to corrupt (male) leadership. This is an apparent paradox, which has been identified by both popular writers and academics. Why countries so long associated with patriarchy, misogyny, sexism, and the subordination of women become the focus for so many politically prominent females?
The common explanation for this paradox is also shared by analysts. They attribute it simply to inheritance as each of these women is a widow or daughter of a slain male leader, a leader vital in the history of their respective countries. Women have tended to move into top positions of power in South and South-East Asia under the most dramatic of circumstances - as a result of assassinations, coups, sudden death of the previous leader or by moving to the forefront of the opposition against nondemocratic forces. The image is presented that these women arrived in this position solely by chance, through the death of their male-associated figure and the lack of an alternative strong leader. They are seen to be like puppets, jerked around by (perhaps ill) fate. A dismissal of these women's rise to power as insignificant and their representation as puppets is not entirely accidental. If a woman is already at the top of the elite, the observers consciously or unconsciously preserving gender bias in the political system can discount her as an anomaly unlikely to be repeated or attribute her success to family and spouse rather than her own skill or efforts.
Returning to the main paradox of female prime ministers balanced against the hierarchically low position of the vast majority of South Asian women, the book under review argues that succession to head of the government is not an automatic, accidental process. Suvorova explores the way in which succession always has to be ‘constructed’. To illustrate this point Suvorova considers in detail the rise to power of some South and Southeast Asian women. These accounts show that all women-leaders had to win popular elections, usually after significant periods of campaigning or political struggle.
Suvorova tries to answer the question how these women have managed to take power? For while they have had the essential family background for the task, they have still had to overcome the huge barrier of being female. What factors could possibly have led so many men who believe in their own natural dominance over women in society to vote for a female as their most powerful citizen? Suvorova suggests there are many possible advantages which elite women can hold over elite males. She also advances a hypothesis that these women have not presented themselves as de-facto males, but have instead been able to exploit the traditions of femininity, motherhood, and kinship in South Asia. She also refers to the tradition of religion, myth and even tales of family structure, in which both the male and the female are united in some sort of a whole. Suvorova argues that the mere existence of a role model of a woman running the country is likely to have a positive influence on the position of women within that country, no matter how difficult that may be to measure.
