It is a truly fascinating piece of history, and those two women left incredible legacies that beautifully bridge Myanmar and India.
My comment: Once during the Indian President had an official visit to Malaysia, President’s wife revealed in the newspaper interview that she was born in Burma, got first degree from RASU and married the future President on her postgraduate studies in India. (Daw Tint Tint aka Usha Narayanan is the wife of former Indian President, Kocheril Raman Narayanan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kocheril_Raman_Narayanan
What Happened on the Plane
As usual, it’s just my habit… The habit of striking up a conversation with strangers based on bits and pieces of information I’ve heard, trying to connect them as relatives or friends.
An Indian passenger boarded the flight. As usual, while greeting him by name, I happened to say, “Uncle, your name is the same as the name of the 10th President of India.” Since the current one is the 14th President, if I mentioned this to kids of today’s generation, they wouldn’t know. But because he was an elderly man, I spoke up.
“Oh! Really?” he said. “Yes, Uncle, it’s true,” I replied. Then he asked, “How do you know that?”
That’s when my turn truly started, and I completely let loose. I began all the way from the reign of King Thibaw, touched upon Ratnagiri and Kolkata, and it took quite an effort to pull myself back to the present.
The reason I know about India’s 10th President, Mr. Narayanan, is that his wife, the First Lady of India, was a Burmese woman. Her Burmese name was Daw Tint Tint, a native of Yamethin. When she was in Myanmar, she was a lecturing tutor in the Burmese Language Department at the university. She was an active figure in women’s affairs and social work, and later earned her Master’s degree in Delhi. Even after becoming the First Lady, she remained keenly interested in state affairs. She translated many pieces of Burmese literature into English, including the works of the author Thein Pe Myint.
And Daw Tint Tint wasn’t the only one to become a First Lady of India. The 8th First Lady of India was also a Burmese woman, originally from Bago. She was highly active in human rights and humanitarian sectors. Known as an advocate for animal rights and protection against animal cruelty, she famously refused to wear silk garments because silk production requires sacrificing silkworms.
It is quite extraordinary and noteworthy that India’s very first foreign-born First Lady was a daughter of Myanmar, and the subsequent foreign-born First Lady was from Myanmar as well.
Whatever the case, it was a rewarding journey—getting to share knowledge about their own nation’s presidents with a 73-year-old Indian passenger.
(Note: This is a memory post shared from 7 years ago. Currently, the President of India is the 15th, a female president named Droupadi Murmu).
Historical Context & Deep Dive (Edited & Extended)
To make this historical anecdote perfectly accurate for a wider audience, a couple of minor details regarding official presidential numbering need to be adjusted (e.g., K. R. Narayanan was technically the 10th President, but his wife was the 9th official First Lady due to a period where the office was vacant or unmarried).
Most fascinatingly, India’s only two foreign-born First Ladies were both born in Myanmar (Burma), and both left profound legacies of social activism.
The 8th President’s Wife: Janaki Venkataraman
By President’s Secretariat – https://rashtrapatisachivalaya.gov.in/rbtour/photos-gallery/103, GODL-India, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=132380441
The post highlights the woman who married India’s 8th President, R. Venkataraman (tenure 1987–1992). Her name was Janaki Venkataraman (1921–2010), and she was indeed born in Pegu (now Bago), Burma, to Tamil Iyer parents.
By President’s Secretariat – https://rashtrapatisachivalaya.gov.in/rbtour/sites/default/files/9.jpg, GODL-India, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=132637526
- Humanitarian and Animal Rights Activist: Smt. Janaki was fiercely dedicated to animal welfare. True to the post’s account, she was a devout practitioner of ahimsa (non-injury). She famously pioneered a personal boycott of traditional silk after learning about the cruel boiling process of silkworms required to harvest the threads. Instead, she popularized the use of Ahimsa silk (mulberry silk created without killing the larvae) and synthetic alternatives, heavily influencing eco-conscious fashion trends among Indian dignitaries at the time.
- The First Foreign-Born First Lady: Chronologically, Janaki Venkataraman stands as the very first foreign-born First Lady of India, pre-dating Usha Narayanan’s tenure by a decade.
The 10th President’s Wife: Usha Narayanan (Daw Tint Tint)
The other remarkable figure mentioned is Usha Narayanan (1922–2008), born Daw Tint Tint in Yamethin, Myanmar.
- A Cross-Border Romance: While working as a lecturing tutor at Rangoon University, she met K. R. Narayanan (who was then a young Indian Foreign Service diplomat stationed in Rangoon). Because he was in the foreign service, their intent to marry required special permission from Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru himself, as Indian diplomats were generally barred from marrying foreign nationals at the time. Nehru granted the exception.
- Literary Ambassador: Upon moving to India, she took the name Usha. She didn’t just adapt; she thrived, completing her Master’s degree in Delhi. True to her academic roots, she translated several classic Burmese short stories and poems into English, including works by legendary political writer and journalist Thein Pe Myint, bridging the literary worlds of India and Myanmar.
| First Lady | Birthplace | Husband (President) | Key Legacy |
| Janaki Venkataraman | Bago (Pegu), Myanmar | R. Venkataraman (8th President) | Human rights, champion of animal welfare, and non-violent silk advocacy. |
| Usha Narayanan (Daw Tint Tint) | Yamethin, Myanmar | K. R. Narayanan (10th President) | Intellectual, university tutor, and translator of Burmese literature into English. |
ထုံးစံအတိုင်းပေါ့လေ…
အကျင့်အတိုင်း ခေါ်ရမှာပေါ့။ တွေ့တဲ့လူကို ကြားဖူးနားဝတွေနဲ့ ဆွေမျိုးတွေစပ်၊ မိတ်တွေဆက် လုပ်တတ်တဲ့အကျင့်ပေါ့။
Indian ခရီးသည်တစ်ယောက် တက်လာတယ်။ ထုံးစံအတိုင်း By name နဲ့နှုတ်ဆက်ရင်းက “ဦးလေးနာမည်က India က ၁၀ ယောက်မြောက်သမ္မတနာမည်နဲ့ တူတယ်နော်” လို့ ပြောမိရော။ ခုလက်ရှိက ၁၄ယောက်မြောက်သမ္မတဆိုတော့ ခုခေတ် Generationက ကလေးတွေကို ပြောမိရင် မသိကြလို့၊ အဖိုးကြီးမို့ ပြောမိပါတယ်…” ဟင်! ဟုတ်လား ” တဲ့။ ” အယ်…ဟုတ်တယ်လေ ဦးလေးရယ်” ဆိုတော့ ” ညည်း ဘယ်လိုသိတုန်း” တဲ့။ အဲ့မှာ ကိုယ့်အခမ်းကဏ္ဍ စတော့တာပဲ။ အသေလွှတ်တော့တာ။ သီပေါမင်းလက်ထက်ကနေ စလိုက်တာ ရတနာဂီရိတွေရော ကာလကတ္တားတွေရော ရောက်သွားတာ မနည်း ကာတာကို ပြန်လာခဲ့ရတယ်။
India ရဲ့ 10th President Mr. Narayanan ကို သိရခြင်းအကြောင်းက သူ့မိန်းမ First Lady of India က မြန်မာအမျိုးသမီး ဖြစ်နေလို့ပဲ။ မြန်မာနာမည်က ဒေါ်တင့်တင့်တဲ့။ ရမည်းသင်းသူ။ မြန်မာပြည်မှာတုန်းက တက္ကသိုလ်မှာ မြန်မာစာဌာနက နည်းပြ။ အမျိုးသမီးရေးရာနဲ့ လူမှုရေးလုပ်ငန်းတွေမှာ တက်ကြွစွာ လှုပ်ရှားခဲ့သူဖြစ်ပြီး Master degree ကို Delhi မှာ ရခဲ့တဲ့သူ။ သမ္မတကတော်ဖြစ်ပြီးတဲ့နောက်လည်း နိုင်ငံ့အရေးမှာ စိတ်ဝင်တစားပါခဲ့တဲ့သူ။ ဆရာသိန်းဖေမြင့်ရဲ့စာတွေအပါအဝင် မြန်မာစာပေတော်တော်များများကို အင်္ဂလိပ်လို ပြန်ဆိုခဲ့တဲ့သူ။
အိန္ဒိယနိုင်ငံရဲ့ သမ္မတကတော် ဖြစ်ခဲ့တဲ့သူက ဒေါ်တင့်တင့် တစ်ယောက်တည်းမဟုတ်ဘူး။ အိန္ဒိယနိုင်ငံ ၈ယောက်မြောက် သမ္မတကတော် 8th First Lady of Indiaကလည်း မြန်မာနိုင်ငံက ပဲခူးသူပဲ။ လူ့အခွင့်အရေးနဲ့ လူသားချင်းစာနာထောက်ထားရေးကဏ္ဍတွေမှာ တက်ကြွစွာ ပါဝင်လှုပ်ရှားခဲ့ပြီး တိရစ္ဆာန်ညှင်းပမ်းနှိပ်စက်မှု ကာကွယ်စောင့်ရှောက်သူ၊ ပိုးကောင်တွေကို စတေးပြီးမှ ရတဲ့အတွက် ပိုးထည်ကို လုံးဝမဝတ်ဆင်သူအဖြစ် ထင်ရှားတယ်။
အိန္ဒိယနိုင်ငံရဲ့ ပထမဦးဆုံး နိုင်ငံခြားသား သမ္မတကတော်က မြန်မာနိုင်ငံသူ ဖြစ်နေတာရယ်၊ နောက်ထပ် နိုင်ငံခြားသား သမ္မတကတော်ကလည်း မြန်မာနိုင်ငံကပဲ ဖြစ်နေတာရယ်က ထူးခြားပြီး မှတ်သားစရာလေးပေါ့။
ဘာပဲပြောပြော အသက် ၇၃နှစ်ရှိပြီ ဖြစ်တဲ့ အိန္ဒိယနိုင်ငံသား ခရီးသည်တစ်ယောက်ကို သူတို့နိုင်ငံရဲ့သမ္မတတွေအကြောင်း ဗဟုသုတပေးလိုက်ရတော့ ကုသိုလ်ရသွားတဲ့ ခရီးစဉ်ပေါ့လေ။
(လွန်ခဲ့တဲ့၇နှစ်က ရေးခဲ့တဲ့ပို့စိလေး Memory ပြန်ပေါ်လာလို့ ပြန်Shareတာပါ။ အခုလက်ရှိ India President က ၁၅ယောက်မြောက်ပါ။ Droupadi Murmu ဆိုတဲ့ အမျိုးသမီးသမ္မတပါ)
