As Craig Reynolds points out in this sparking collection of essays, writing the history of Siam has always been a dangerous undertaking. This is especially true for amateurs working outside the supervision of royal authorities. In the late nineteenth century, two ambitious novices found themselves on trial, persecuted by the palace for their audacity and imagination in writing about court figures. They were imprisoned, and in one case flogged, for their unauthorized histories. Recent accusations of lèse-majesté leveled at historians Michael Wright and Dr. Piriya Krairiksh remind us that the writing of Siam's history remains a pursuit fraught with peril even for longtime professionals.
Thailand, spared the debasement of Western colonialism and the devastating wars of liberation and ideology that came in its wake, now finds itself in the midst of what one Thai politician and self-appointed palace defender contends is a “cultural war” of ideas over the writing of history, especially the place of the monarchy in its historical narratives (p. vii). In writing about nineteenth-century historians who became casualties of an earlier cultural war, Reynolds demonstrates that if such a conflict is under way, its casus belli occurred 150 years ago. His study invites unstated comparisons to contemporary novices such as the journalist Paul M. Handley, whose superb 2006 biography of King Bhumibol Adulyadej made him the envy of many academic historians of Thailand while also the target of official condemnation and popular anger throughout the kingdom. As Reynolds points out, “In the Thai public sphere there is no such thing as disinterested history” (p. viii).
This volume brings together twelve essays by Reynolds exploring the creation of history as a fractious, dangerous, and sometimes subversive pastime. Ten of the included essays are reprinted and revised versions of previously published works; two are new to this edition. Reynolds groups the chapters under the headings “Studying Southeast Asia,” “Seditious Histories of Siam,” “Cultural Studies,” and the “Dialectics of Globalism.”
The contested pasts of the subtitle are varied. They include the accumulated body of competing theories offered by Western historians searching for an authentic or indigenous narrative of premodern Southeast Asia (chapters 1 and 2). They are the unauthorized, unflattering, and unorthodox historical projects generated by brave and sometimes naive souls (chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6). They are the enduring belief systems and sacred texts that both resist and accommodate the infusion of new knowledge and attitudes, as well as the forms in which these new notions are conveyed (chapter 7, 8, 9, and 10). They include also the nationalist history of a multiethnic country whose changed name makes the accommodation of non-Thai pasts a sometimes awkward exercise (chapter 11).
Siam/Thailand is central to all of the essays, but Reynolds focuses on the premodern history of Southeast Asia in the first two essays. The first, “A New Look at Old Southeast Asia,” is a refreshing reexamination of the theme-driven and polemical theories by the pioneering scholars of early Southeast Asia working in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. The “old Southeast Asia” refers not only to the premodern era but also to the increasingly unsatisfying (and, perhaps, outdated) conceptions of ancient Southeast Asian states that owe more to modern political thought than to the ancient worlds they manifested. In taking up F. R. Ankersmit's admonition to “think about the past rather than investigate it,” Reynolds interrogates the early efforts at tracing origins and identifying agency that gave us the enduring terms of “local genius,” “mandala state,” and “galactic polity” formulated by H. G. Q. Wales, Oliver Wolters, and S. J. Tambiah and embraced by those came in their wake (p. 3). Reynolds finds a shared search for “origins, agency, and difference” in their efforts to locate and delineate an authentic reconstruction of Southeast Asia's premodern past—and in doing so to legitimize Southeast Asia as a region and a field of study (p. 27).
In “Paradigms of the Premodern State,” one of the new essays in the volume, Reynolds goes from thinking about the past to doing something about it. He demonstrates the shortcomings of Weberian-derived models of statecraft that have been applied to Southeast Asia. The region's shifting centers and lack of bounded, territorial sovereignty in the premodern era underscore the inadequacies of applying a Western political theory formulated with European kingdoms in mind. One novel reason offered by Reynolds to explain the absence of a satisfying or coherent picture of early Southeast Asian states is the neglect of military studies about this era. Although the dynastic histories of all Southeast Asian states are dominated by bloody succession disputes waged by military men and their factions, few scholars have addressed the technology or strategies of premodern warfare with any depth or detail. In his search for an indigenous paradigm that would successfully replace or complement the often ill-fitting model of “state” derived from Euro-American theory, Reynolds advocates a new and creative interaction among the social science disciplines that extends beyond the Western-derived political models generated by Western historians who can read ancient and difficult languages. Both chapters should be required reading for all first-semester graduate students in every field of Southeast Asian studies.
The remaining chapters focus primarily on Siam/Thailand but contain much for any historian, political scientist, or anthropologist who is interested in novel approaches to Southeast Asia's history, nationalism, and national histories. Especially enjoyable are the studies of Siamese and Thai seditionist scholars whose daring, and sometimes foolhardy, studies invited official wrath from the highest realms of the state.
Reynolds's sympathies lie with the seditionist. His analysis of the case of K. S. R. Kulap Kritsananon betrays admiration for this plucky commoner who illegally borrowed sources from the royal archives, created fictionalized chronicles to fill the gaps in Siam's recorded past, insulted an absolute monarch, served time and hard labor in a Bangkok prison, and cashed in on his notoriety in old age by selling his name and likeness to print advertisers. This prolific amateur who “consumed history as if it were the only source of nourishment” first runs afoul of the palace for drawing literally parallels between King Chulalongkorn and a fictionalized incompetent royal heir from the Ayutthaya era named “Phra Chulapinket,” whom Kulap himself created (pp. 59, 65–66). Hard labor in jail does not discourage the irrepressible Kulap from further quasi-scholarly exploits that, to no one's surprise, land him in trouble yet again. The others seditionists include the late nineteenth-century poet Nai Tim Sukkhayang, who faced execution for writing a historical poem that allegedly encouraged mutiny and, more interestingly, violated a literary genre. Jit Phumisak, the rebellious and multitalented intellectual of the early Cold War period, appears in several essays and is the focus of “Feudalism as a Trope of the Past,” Reynolds's analysis of the movement to translate sakdina, Siam's traditional system of social hierarchy, with the English term “feudalism.” Jit's and others' insistence on connecting the two terms allegedly encouraged subversive revisionism among Thailand's intelligentsia, demonstrating that “metaphor has material force” (p. 121).
The other new essay in the collection, “Thai Manual Knowledge: Theory and Practice,” explores the integrity and mutability of ancient Siamese treatises formatted as what Reynolds defines as “manual knowledge.” In examining the indigenous knowledge contained within these authoritative monarchical and Buddhist volumes, Reynolds applies the tools of the historian to a topic tackled almost exclusively by anthropologists or ethnoscientists to determine the social meaning of manuals. It is easy to imagine the influx of Western technological and scientific knowledge in the late nineteenth century posing a threat to the long-standing Siamese manual knowledge on cosmology, medicine, grammar, and military strategy. But instead of being superseded, these manuals facilitated the intake of foreign knowledge by incorporating Western ideas into a domestic format and making it appear local and practical. Printing, introduced to Siam by American missionaries, did not subvert this manual knowledge—much of it traditionally preserved in large accordion-like folios—but rather helped it increase its circulation by making it more accessible and removing the need for a teacher. The chapter is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the history of Siam's textual culture.
The essays in this collection are lucid and provocative. To borrow the title of a classic Siamese literacy manual analyzed by Reynolds, Seditious Histories is a “gem of thought.”
