Michael Aris obituary

Dr Michael Aris, who has died of cancer on his 53rd birthday, was a leading scholar in Tibetan and Himalayan studies. But in recent years, it was as husband of the Burmese democracy leader and Nobel Peace prize laureate, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, that he most often appeared in the international headlines. During an industrious life, he bequeathed a remarkable legacy of original research and writings on Tibetan literature and history, Bhutan and other little-known aspects of the Himalayan world.

Michael’s life was always one of knowledge-seeking and travel. He was born in Havana, Cuba, where his French-Canadian mother, Josette, the daughter of the Canadian ambassador, and father John, an officer with the British Council, were living. He was then educated, with his twin brother Anthony, at the Worth School in Sussex and later Durham University, where he gained a BA Honours in modern history.

During his undergraduate days he first met ‘Daw Suu’, the central passion of his life, through a mutual university friend, Christopher, the son of Patricia and Sir Paul (later Lord) Gore-Booth, a former ambassador to Burma, who were her guardians when she came to study at Oxford.

From 1967-73, he was a private tutor to the royal family of Bhutan, then a forbidden kingdom. Embarking on research into Bhutanese history, he became head of the translation department of the government of Bhutan. However, his friendship with Daw Suu always remained, and, following a long courtship frequently conducted by letter, on New Year’s Day, 1972, they were married in a simple Buddhist ceremony at the Gore-Booths’ London family home. Michael then commenced his PhD in Tibetan literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, and for much of the next decade they and their two young sons, Alexander (born 1973) and Kim (born 1977) shared journeys and periods of residence in remote Himalayan regions, including Bhutan, Nepal, Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh.

In 1973, Michael also led the University of California expedition to the Kutang and Nubri districts of northern Nepal. Back at Oxford in the late 1970s, he was elected a research fellow at St John’s College (and later Wolfson College). He began a prodigious output in academic articles and books, including Bhutan: The Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom; Views of Medieval Bhutan: The Diary And Drawings Of Samuel Davis, 1783 and Sources For The History Of Bhutan. Between 1985-87, he became a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies in Simla.

Michael’s many talents went far beyond his writings, and, in a field of scholarship where sensitivity and diplomatic skills are frequently needed, he displayed an extraordinary ability to bring different people together in a quiet and non-judgmental way. An early example was the seminar on Tibetan studies he convened at Oxford in 1979 in honour of his mentor, Hugh Richardson, the great Tibetan scholar, after which Michael and Daw Suu together edited a volume of papers. Michael swiftly became a key fulcrum for Tibetan studies in Britain and the international academic world. His gentle and modest personality was combined with great determination and belief.

On one quiet evening at home in March 1988 came the telephone call which shattered the Oxford idyll. ‘I had a premonition that our lives would change for ever,’ Michael wrote in Freedom From Fear. Daw Suu returned to Burma to care for her ailing mother and was swept up in the pro-democracy protests that brought down the Burma Socialist Programme Party. the government of the long-time military ruler, General Ne Win. As daughter of the late independence hero Aung San, she was a potent symbol to the crowds. From the moment she made her first public speech to half a million people on the Shwe Dagon Hill in 1988, it was clear she was a natural orator and political leader. There was no turning back.

The day-to-day care of their two sons passed to Michael, a task he willingly undertook and had long been prepared for. Michael later revealed that, in one of the 187 letters she had sent him in Bhutan in the months before their marriage, Daw Suu had only one request: ‘That should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them.’

These were very difficult years of worry and personal pressure. Michael never complained. His support for Daw Suu, as well as his private commitment and belief in the goal of peaceful reconciliation in Burma, were unshakeable. When he lost his own father in 1989, Michael was initially allowed visas by the new military government to visit Daw Suu at her family home on University Avenue in Rangoon. In one much-publicised incident that year, he joined his wife and the boys for 22 days of isolation from the outside world after she was placed under house arrest, with Michael arriving to find Daw Suu in the third day of a hunger strike. ‘An Oxford don is missing,’ the headlines read.

Subsequently, the visas stopped, and it was not until May 1992 that they were intermittently resumed, continuing until 1995, when Daw Suu was finally released from six years under house arrest. Although neither knew it, the days Michael and Daw Suu spent together over Christmas and New Year 1995 were the last time they saw each other.

Michael and the boys were loyally supportive, travelling the world to pick up human rights’ awards on Daw Suu’s behalf, including the 1990 Sakharov prize of the European parliament and the 1991 Nobel peace prize. Family life may have been disrupted, but they enjoyed the love and support of a close family circle.

Michael never sought the limelight and, other than relaying the occasional public statement from Daw Suu, was careful never to engage in Burmese political affairs. In private, in response to constant enquiries, he would encourage people to support peace, reform and education in the transition to democracy.

He never publicly responded to the frequent denunciations he and Daw Suu suffered for their marriage in Burma’s state-controlled press, where she was accused of losing ‘her origin and lineage’ by ‘taking a white alien as a husband’. Instead, he thanked the military authorities for the ‘courtesy’ afforded him during his visits. Despite such pressures, Michael was able to maintain his own writings throughout the last decade of his life, during which he became a research fellow and member of the governing body at St Antony’s College, Oxford (Dean, 1998). In 1990-92, he was also a visiting professor at Harvard University. His publications included Hidden Treasures And Secret Lives: A Study of Pemalingpa and The Raven Crown: The Origins Of Buddhist Monarchy In Bhutan; he edited Lamas, Princes And Brigands: Joseph Rock’s Photographs Of The Tibetan Borderlands Of China and Hugh Richardson’s High Peaks, Pure Earth.

The book that was to have the most impact was Freedom From Fear, which he edited from the speeches and works of Daw Suu, and to which he wrote a moving introduction. Published in 1991, it swiftly became a Penguin Classic with forewords by the Czech leader Vaclav Havel and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.

When the seriousness of his cancer became apparent, Michael bore the news with characteristic forbearance and courage. He energetically reorganised his affairs, working until the end on his long-held dream to establish a specialist Tibetan and Himalayan studies centre in Oxford. He had made an impressive fund-raising start, but it will fall to others to complete his task.

His request for a visa to visit Daw Suu for one last time was effectively rejected by the military government, while Michael and Daw Suu had long both discussed and agreed that she would never leave Burma unless she was given cast-iron guarantees she would be permitted to return.

Despite the last-minute offer of a passport by the military government, there were still doubts over the conditions and it was decided Daw Suu must stay. In Freedom From Fear, Michael revealed just how prescient they had both been about the possible fate of their marriage and a likely day of reckoning. ‘Sometimes I am beset by fears that circumstances and national considerations might tear us apart just when we are so happy in each other that separation would be a torment,’ Daw Suu had written to him before their marriage. ‘And yet such fears are so futile and inconsequential: if we love and cherish each other as much as we can while we can, I am sure love and compassion will triumph in the end.’

A lifelong student of Buddhism, Michael added: ‘Fate and history never seem to work in orderly ways. Timings are unpredictable and do not wait upon convenience.’

• Michael Vaillancourt Aris, scholar, born March 27, 1946; died March 27, 1999.