UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Reinventing Siam: Ideas and Culture in Thailand, 1920-1944 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6g01r29t Author Subrahmanyan, Arjun Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Reinventing Siam: Ideas and Culture in Thailand, 1920-1944 by Arjun Subrahmanyan A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division Of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Peter Zinoman, Chair Professor Eugene Irschick Professor Penelope Edwards Spring 2013 Reinventing Siam: Ideas and Culture in Thailand, 1920-1944 Copyright 2013 by Arjun Subrahmanyan Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Chapter One, Introduction: Insiders and Outsiders in Thai Intellectual Life: Rethinking the 1932 “Revolution” 1 Chapter Two: Country Life and its Narratives 12 Chapter Three: Education, Propaganda and Peasants 63 Chapter Four: Outsiders and the Sangha: The Regional Challenge 122 Chapter Five: Fiction and Social Consciousness 170 Chapter Six: Self and Society: Conceptualizations of Thai Literature 218 Chapter Seven: The Salvific Science: Cosmopolitan Buddhism in the 1930s 244 Chapter Eight, Conclusion: The Incomplete Revolution 290 Bibliography 295 i Acknowledgements I am very grateful for the support of the U.S. Department of Education via a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship, and to the University of California Office of the President for its Pacific Rim Research Program grant. My work could not have been undertaken without these institutions. I also would like to thank the National Research Council of Thailand for research clearance that allowed me to work in the National Archives in Bangkok. The staff at the archives helped me greatly in locating materials, as did the staff of the neighboring National Library’s rare books room. I owe thanks to many Thai ajahns for their conversation and support, and in particular to Pitch Pongsawat, Chalong Soontravanich and Thanapol Limapichart, all of Chulalongkorn University. Ajahn Pitch acted as my Thai research mentor, while Chalong and Thanapol allowed me to present some of my then rudimentary ideas in a Chula History seminar in 2009. I cannot hope to match any of these men’s knowledge of Thai history and culture, but perhaps can offer some new and useful ways of viewing the Thai past from a farang perspective. In California, I am very grateful for the support of my dissertation committee: Peter Zinoman, Penny Edwards and Eugene Irschick. From all of them I learned a tremendous amount about Asian pasts and how to write history. To Professor Zinoman in particular I owe my profound thanks for his patient and close supervision of my project. My arguments and writing would be considerably worse without his tireless demands for clarity and precision. ii Chapter One, Introduction: Insiders and Outsiders in Thai Intellectual Life: Rethinking the 1932 “Revolution” Early on the morning of June 24, 1932, tanks and armored cars rumbled through the streets of the Thai capital Bangkok and quickly surrounded the ministries and palaces that formed the heart of state power. Within a few hours, the 150-year old absolute monarchy had been abolished. The old ruling class was caught completely by surprise; many were arrested at their palaces still in their pajamas. A secretive group calling itself the “People’s Party” (Khana Ratsadon) had seized power in the name of the people. Atop their tanks and cars, the group distributed flyers to Bangkok citizens who had come out on the streets that morning eager to find out what had happened. In part, the group’s manifesto read: “The government of the king has treated the people as slaves and as animals ... (T)he people have to sweat blood in order to find just a little money ... But those of royal blood are sleeping and eating happily. There is no country in the world that gives its royalty so much money as this, except the Tsar and the German Kaiser, whose nations have already overthrown their thrones.”1 Later that morning the news was brought to King Prajadhipok. The heir to the House of Chakri was playing golf at his seaside palace Klai Kangwon (“Far from Worry”) 1 “Announcement of the People’s Party No. 1,” in Pridi Banomyong, Pridi by Pridi: Selected Writings on Life, Politics, Economy, Baker and Phasuk, trans. and intro. (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2000), 70. 1 in Hua Hin, a coastal resort a few hours train journey from the capital. After conferring with his advisers, the king decided not to resist the takeover. He capitulated to the rebels’ demands that the kingdom henceforth be ruled as a constitutional monarchy that vested sovereign power in the people, ruled through a parliament and guaranteed basic popular rights and freedoms. The People’s Party had apparently triumphed and altered the course of Thai history. The “revolution,” as it came to be known,2 however was not the popular revolt against tyranny that it claimed to be. The People’s Party lacked a popular foundation, and instead comprised a very small group of civilian and military officers from the state bureaucracy. Contrary to their pledge to liberate the masses from autocracy, the Khana Ratsadon’s top-down democracy sought to establish a system of social control. Their program strongly resembled the policies of the absolute kingship. The party’s radicalism, moreover, was short-lived. Within 48 hours they asked the king’s forgiveness for the initial manifesto’s fiery language, and thereafter governed with the crucial assistance of the old royal-aristocratic class in the bureaucracy. While the constitutional system was maintained for the next fifteen years, it became a hollow shell. After an initial brief period of solidarity the People’s Party broke apart into factions. Ultimately the military wing of the group triumphed, and by 1939 the country was a dictatorship. 2 The word was coined by Prince Wan Waithayakon, a royal intellectual who supported constitutionalism; he invented patiwat for revolution about a month after the coup. It has remained the only word used to describe 1932. Wan, “The Future of Siam,” Bangkok Times, February 27, 1933. 2 The failed establishment of democracy dominates the historiography of 1932. Studies about the event and its immediate aftermath focus on the bitter intra-elite three- way battle between the military, the civilian group in the People’s Party and the old royal-aristocratic elite. Further, the legacy of 1932 is explained as a depressingly repetitive series of military coups and revolts that have marked Thai politics ever since. Histories of the period are thus dominated by studies of Bangkok politics and state “insiders,” primarily the military, but also the monarchy and the new civilian leaders from the bureaucracy. The best of these studies are sophisticated and essential guides to modern Thai politics.3 This thesis, however, argues that the real “revolution” of twentieth century Thai history was not political but intellectual. Two more fundamental processes preceded and accompanied the irregular transition to a constitutional political system in interwar Siam, and both would be of much more profound social importance than 1932’s tangled politics. First was the attempt to overturn a long- established state policy orientation that always favored the city at the expense of rural poverty and isolation. “Outsiders” to the royal-aristocratic and bureaucratic 3 Charnvit Kasetsiri and Thamrongsak Phetlert-anand, Patiwat 2475 (1932 Revolution in Siam) (Bangkok: Textbooks Project (TB), 2004), Saneh Chamarik, Kanmuang Thai kap Pathanakan Rathamanun (Thai Politics and Constitutional Development, 3rd ed. (Bangkok: TB, 2006); Suthachai Yimprasert, Phaen Ching Chat Thai (Struggle to Save the Nation). Classic accounts of pre-coup Siam: Nakharin Mektrairat, Kanpatiwat Syam 2475 (The Revolution in Siam 1932) (Bangkok: Fa Diaokan, 2010 (1992)) and Khwam Khit Khwam Ru le Amnat thang Kanmuang nai Patiwat Siam 2475 (Thought, Knowledge and Political Power in the Siamese Revolution of 1932) (Bangkok: Fa Diaokan, 2003); Benjamin A. Batson, The End of the Absolute Monarchy in Siam (Oxford: Oxford University, 1984). 3 elite brought new conceptions of social integration and community into public discourse for the first time in Thai history, and sought to end the starkly uneven development between the country and the city.4 Second, outsiders also embarked on an intellectual renovation that sought the creation of a modern self – critical, autonomous and cosmopolitan – as an agent of social welfare and enlightenment. The modern self was also, crucially, egalitarian. Because of this advancement of an alternative model of personal responsibility and social order to the statist, kingly orthodoxy, the wide-ranging discourse of the outsiders tested the ethics of submission to the social hierarchy, the monarchy and, after 1932, the top-down democracy. Very little research has been done on the outsiders’ pivotal contribution to Thai modernity despite their importance in twentieth century history. This dissertation studies the intellectual and social history of Siam between 1920 and 1944, the key years of the mental transformation, and describes the rival discourses of state insiders and outsiders. In contrast to the aristocrats, military officers and lawyers who controlled 4 I’ve been inspired to think of the interwoven careers of state insiders and outsiders as centrally important by two studies that explain (perhaps coincidentally) contemporaneous but markedly different intellectual developments in Japan and Germany. Andrew Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (Berkeley: University of California, 1988) and Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001 (1968)). Outsiders in Japanese and German societies contributed vitally to their countries’ public life and both suffered terribly as their political systems collapsed in hyper-nationalism and war.