NALANDA-SRIWIJAYA CENTRE WORKING PAPER SERIES NO. 17 EXPLORING CAM NARRATIVE SOURCES FOR HISTORY OF THE CAM DIASPORA OF CAMBODIA The Cams keep the memory of their history and can still read and write the traditional Cam script. Photo taken by author in Kompong Chhnang province, a Cam village in Cambodia, during eldwork in 2008. Nicolas Weber NALANDA-SRIWIJAYA CENTRE WORKING PAPER SERIES NO. 17 (Feb 2015) EXPLORING CAM NARRATIVE SOURCES FOR HISTORY OF THE CAM DIASPORA OF CAMBODIA Nicolas Weber Dr Nicolas Weber earned his PhD from the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO or Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations) in Paris in 2005. Dr Weber has been working with the École Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO or French School of Asian Studies) within the research program “Malay World-Indochinese World”. He has also worked at the University of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur) as a postdoctoral research fellow, lecturer and senior lecturer. He is engaged in ongoing research on the social and political history of ethnic minorities in Southeast Asia, with a special interest in the Cam (Cham). His latest works include a book entitled Histoire de la diaspora Cam (History of the Cam Diaspora) and he is currently working on the English version of this book. Email: [email protected] The NSC Working Paper Series is published Citations of this electronic publication should be electronically by the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre of the made in the following manner: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. Nicolas Weber, Exploring Cam Narrative Sources for History of the Cam Diaspora of Cambodia, © Copyright is held by the author or authors of each Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre Working Paper No Working Paper. 17 (Feb 2015), http://www.iseas.edu.sg/nsc/ documents/working_papers/nscwps017.pdf NSC Working Papers cannot be republished, reprinted, or NSC WPS Editors: reproduced in any format without the permission of the paper’s author or authors. Andrea Acri Derek Heng Joyce Zaide ISSN:2529-7287 Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre Editorial Committee: Andrea Acri Derek Heng Ten Leu-Jiun Joyce Zaide Typesetting and Layout: Andrea Acri and Joyce Zaide The Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre Working Paper Series has been established to provide an avenue for swift publication and wide dissemination of research conducted or presented within the Centre, and of studies engaging fields of enquiry of relevance to the Centre. The Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre Institute of Southeast Asian Studies 30 Heng Mui Keng Terrace Pasir Panjang, Singapore 119614 TELEPHONE : (+65) 6870 4549 FAX : (+65) 6775 6264 WEB : http://nsc.iseas.edu.sg FACEBOOK : facebook.com/nalandasriwijayacentre Weber: Exploring Cam Narrative Sources NSC Working Paper No. 17 Exploring Cam Narrative Sources for History of the Cam Diaspora of Cambodia Nicolas Weber Abstract The Cams have a long history in Cambodia, their presence dating back to, at least, the 10th century AD. Strangely enough, very few historical sources in Cam exist and one must rely almost exclusively on Khmer Royal Chronicles which reflect only a partial picture of the Cam Diaspora from the 16th to the 19th century. However, the Cams possess a number of texts documenting their modern history, which offer valuable insights into their political and cultural situation within Cambodia from the late 18th century until the establishment of the French in the Indochinese Peninsula in the 19th century. This paper proposes to examine two sets of documents that are extremely use- ful to understand the history of the Cam Diaspora in Cambodia: late 18th and 19th century personal narratives and non-official accounts and royal genealogies. Writ- ten in verse, narrative texts cover a crucial historical period between King Ang Chan (1797–1835) and King Norodom (1860–1901). These texts give precious insights into the involvement of the Cams in Cambodian political affairs and provide invaluable infor- mation on the Cams migrations within and outside Cambodia. Furthermore, the texts provide information regarding the foundation of settlements that still exist in present day Cambodia and Southwestern Vietnam. As to the royal genealogies, although the reliability of documentation is questionable, this material is worth mentioning as it reflects the Cams’ attempts to legitimize their presence in Cambodia by linking the memories of their past in Campā and its former kings to their installation in Cambo- dia. In combination with the genealogies extant, an interesting testimony of the Cams’ perception of the past as a historical continuum that contextualizes their current cul- tural and political perceptions is revealed. Introduction he Cams are one of the most important minorities in Cambodia. They number Tapproximately from 300,000 to 400,000, settled all over Cambodia, with large concentrations in Kandal, Kompong Chhnang, Kompong Cham and Battambang, provinces. The Cams are Austronesians. Their ancestral homeland is the kingdom of Campā, which is an ancient multi-ethnic kingdom whose existence is recorded from the 2nd 1 Weber: Exploring Cam Narrative Sources NSC Working Paper No. 17 century. The kingdom of Campā was located in present-day central Vietnam. Its territory included the coastal plains and the highlands, from today’s Hoành Sơn to Biên Hòa. At the time of its apogee, its territory was composed of five principalities: from north to south, Indrapura (from present-day Quảng Bình to Thừa Thiên), Amarāvatī (Quảng Nam to Quảng Ngãi), Vijaya (Bình Định), Kauṭhāra (Phú Yên to Khánh Hòa) and Pāṇḍuraṅga (Bình Thuận and Ninh Thuận). Campā was progressively absorbed by Vietnam. The last semi-independent principality of Pāṇḍuraṅga disappeared in 1832. Although Cam presence in Cambodia is attested since at least the 11th century, reconstructing the history of the Cam Diaspora in Cambodia using vernacular sources can be quite challenging. The Cams are a people with rich literary and cultural heritage but lack first-hand historical documents. They do not possess historical textual traditions comparable to the Khmers (the Royal Chronicles, for instance) and, therefore, the reconstruction of their history is difficult. All the sources written in Cam that are available nowadays date from the 19th century and only feature events that happened in that century. For information on the Cam community before the 19th century, one must rely on Khmer Royal Chronicles. These documents offer valuable insights of the gradual involvement of Cams in politics, particularly from the 16th century. However, they are partial, and consider the Cams as a monolithic block. For the purpose of this paper, I have worked on two types of documents. The first type is composed of six Cam narratives written in verse and dealing with events that happened throughout the 19th century. These texts provide a mine of information on the socio-political situation of the Cams, and also on Cambodia in the 19th century. They can be investigated from various angles: political, diplomatic, economic, etc., and their contribution to the study of political, social and economic developments in a wider Indochinese and Southeast Asian context makes them highly interesting. The second type of documents I worked with is royal genealogies. Royal genealogies are interesting not so much as historical documents per se but as testimonies of the memory of the exile in Cambodia and the Cams’ attempts to link their past in Campā to their present in Cambodia. I. Cam Narratives Cam sources recording history are extremely limited. However, 19th century Cam narratives offer an important contribution for the reconstruction of the Cam Diaspora history in Cambodia. All the narratives I have used are copies of manuscripts kept in the École Française d’Extrême-Orient and Société Asiatique libraries in Paris. These narratives have been catalogued by a French group of researchers and can be found under the description ‘Misfortunes of the Cam of Cambodia imputable to Cambodians‘ (Lafont, Po and Nara 1977). This description is quite misleading. Even if the texts generally do not describe happy stories, they also do not offer a catalogue of Cam sufferings in Cambodia but feature events that affected some groups of Cams during the 19th century. By no means do these texts feature the expected sufferings of a ‘minority’, i.e. the Cams, oppressed by a ‘majority’, i.e. the Khmers. These texts offer the Cam view of events that shook Cambodia throughout the 19th century. Traditionally, Cam texts do not bear titles and our narratives are no exception. Narratives are written in verse and called baruna. Etienne Aymonier and Antoine Cabaton, 2 Weber: Exploring Cam Narrative Sources NSC Working Paper No. 17 prominent pioneers in Cam studies, indicate in their dictionary that the origins of this term come from the Sanskrit varṇa (Aymonier and Cabaton 1906:328). I personally think that the origin of the term is varṇana, ‘description, account’, which totally corresponds to the nature of our narratives. The Cam Diaspora used baruna form not only for narratives, but also for love poems, moral treaties and recommendations. Barunas are unique to the Cams of Cambodia. The Cams in Central Vietnam do not possess such writings. The closest literary form that can be compared to the baruna is ariya. Ariyas are versified texts as well. In the 19th century, the ariya form was used to record events such as anti- Vietnamese revolts (Ariya Tuen Phaow1 or Ariya Po Baruw for instance), history of the two last rulers of Pāṇḍuraṅga (Po Klan Thu and Po Phaok The),2 and the assimilation of Campā after 1832,3 which make these texts comparable to the Cam Diaspora’s barunas. I found quite a few similarities with other versified Southeast Asian writings, such as the two 19th century Khmer family chronicles, Sastra Voat Kroch and Sastra Lbaœk Rôba Khsat, written by the Venerable Bâtum Baramey Pich.4 Although the language and form of the Khmer texts and the Cam barunas are radically different from each other, the way that the events are featured and the authors’ beginning and ending statements show interesting similarities.