Preamble and caveat

As someone not trained in literary studies and teaching in America, I am contesting the Thai literary canon from the margins — disciplinarily and geographically. This paper examines three early Thai novels that have not been included in the Thai literary canon. In my assessment, these three novels represent important examples of the Thai novel that helped the Thai public deal with the west during the turn of the twentieth century.

My own interest in politics and the novel began in the mid-1970s when I used Kulab Saipradit's Lae pai khang na [Looking to the Future] (1955) in a class at Thammasat University. The novel describes the political awakening of a boy from Isan, Thailand's poorest region, privileged to study at an elite school in Bangkok. There, he meets students from all classes and ethnicity, and a favourite teacher who would later become involved in the overthrow of absolute monarchy. The novel focuses on the years immediately following the 1932 coup, showing how the good intentions of the leaders turn sour when the new democratic regime itself becomes authoritarian and repressive. The novel was to be in three parts, corresponding to human life cycles: formative years, mature years, and declining years. However, Kulab was unable to finish the last volume after his self-imposed political exile in China following the Sarit Thanarat coup in 1957.

I used Lae pai khang na to help contextualise the cultural and social milieu surrounding the 1932 coup that ended absolute monarchy in Siam. During the late 1960s and into the 1970s, heated debates occurred frequently on campus between faculty members who resisted the proliferation of what were seen as trashy leftist novels read by the students, and other lecturers who were willing to discuss what the students were already reading. The schism took on political and disciplinary dimensions when the Thai language faculty argued that they were the true protectors of not just ‘good’ Thai literature, but also the nation, religion and the monarchy. Those who did not agree with them were labelled left-leaning rua hang yao [long tail boats] lecturers out to destroy Thai culture and the Thai nation by encouraging students to read seditious novels and books that celebrated socialism, communism, and social justice.Footnote ¹

The (re)discovery of Thai novels as good sources for social criticism was the work of radical students and some young Thai literary scholars who were looking for ways to critique the inequities of Thai society. Student activists and other young literary critics republished many novels that were banned during the previous dictatorial regimes. In addition to Lae pai khang na, students were reading, for example, Seni Saowaphong's Pisat [The Demon], the many works of Asani Pholachan, and Jit Phumisak's Chomna sakdina Thai [The Real face of Thai feudalism].Footnote ²

Many years later, beginning in 2000, I began teaching a graduate seminar on the Thai novel at Cornell University. These seminars analysed selected Thai novels in light of Hayden White's theory of tropes, the New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt, and translation theory, especially post-colonial translation theory.Footnote ³ In one seminar, we read in the vernacular several of Kulab Saipradit's novels such as Luk phuchai [The real man] (1928), Khang lang phab [Behind the painting] (1937) and Lae pai khang na (1955) to try to understand why his novels are considered by many to be politically radical and socially relevant. In another seminar, we read and compared Mae Wan's (pen name of Phraya Surintharacha) Khwam phayabat [The Vendetta] (1902) with Corelli's Vendetta, and Nai Samran's (pen name of Luang Wilatpariwat, who is popularly known as Khru Liam) Khwam mai phayabat [The Non-vendetta] (1915). What I discovered is that although Kulab's Luk phuchai (1928) was one of the three canonical novels designated as the first authentic Thai novels, Phraya Surintharacha's Khwam phayabat and Luang Wilatpariwat's Khwam mai phayabat that predated them were not. I became intrigued by two fundamental questions: ‘How is the canon constructed?’ and ‘What limitations does a canon impose upon the study of literary transmission and the significance of other literary works ignored by the canon?’

Reconstituting a genealogy of the Thai novel to include pre-1929 novels: Excavating and rehabilitating the very early novels

Although the novel has been a genre of literature in Europe since the publication of Cervantes' Don Quixote in 1615, it was only introduced into Siam at the end of the nineteenth century. Students, both commoners and princes, returning from their studies in Europe began to experiment with writing western-style prose fiction that incorporated realistic plots, believable characters, English grammatical structures, punctuation and dialogue.Footnote ⁹

By the end of the nineteenth century, short stories began to be published regularly. Many of these were translations of English compositions.Footnote ¹⁰ By the early twentieth century, many students who returned from Europe found publishing outlets in the emerging magazine market. Although we know about the names of these magazines and some of the very early compositions from the accounts in Suphanni's book, it is not possible to assess fully the totality of novels that were written during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. Even the titles cited in Suphanni's book could not be easily found in the national or university libraries. It is more than likely that these are still languishing on private collectors' bookcases, or feeding termites in boxes stored away in closets.

Few examples of the novels of the first period remain in circulation. Printing runs were low and circulation was limited to the elite intellectual class. Suphanni says that most of these early novels were based on western examples. In fact, the very first full-length novel published in the Thai language is Phraya Surintharacha's Khwam phayabat that appeared in 1902. It was a translation of Marie Corelli, Vendetta! or the story of one forgotten (1886).Footnote ¹¹

Suphanni also identifies two Thai proto-novels — Nithan thong in and Darawan. Nithan thong in was a detective story inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series. Self-contained episodes were written by Prince Vajiravudh under the pseudonym Nai Kaew Nai Khwan in 1904; 15 episodes were published. Darawan was the work of Kromamuen Narathip Praphanphong using the pseudonym Prasertaksorn. That novel appears to be a proper Thai romance set in Malaya. Aside from Suphanni's excellent analysis and Rachel Harrison's recent interest, these two early novels have not attracted much interest from other literary scholars. It is puzzling to me why these novels are not included in the canon.

Even more puzzling is the exclusion of Khwam Phayabat, which has been acknowledged as the first novel to appear in the Thai language. Even though Khwam Phayabat is a translation, it introduced the Thai public and aspiring authors to the novel form. Neither Suphanni nor Wibha analysed this novel in their influential texts, nor has the novel been mentioned in recent publications that identify/institutionalise important works of literature. Ignoring the importance of this translated novel is, in my opinion, a grave oversight.Footnote ¹²

I will devote the rest of this article to examining three non-canonical early novels, each representing the genre of the vernacularised (translated) novel, the original Thai novel, and the hybrid/imitation/bi-cultural novel that helped prepare Siam for modernity and political and cultural autonomy. The three novels were written by two authors — Phraya Surintharacha and Luang Wilat Pariwat. Phraya Surintharacha, using the pseudonym Mae Wan, published Khwam phayabat in 1902. Luang Wilatpariwat or Khru Liam used the pen name Nai Samran to compose Khwam mai phayabat in 1915. He also wrote Nang neramid [Created nymphs] soon after Khwam mai phayabat, in 1916.Footnote ¹³ Contemporary Thai literary scholars have dismissed these novels as inauthentic Thai because they are nangsu plae (translated book), nangsu prae (transformed book), or nagsu plaeng (metamorphosised book), which are distinctions without difference.

Vernacularisation as appropriation

Thai culture over the centuries has benefited from translations of literary works from other cultures.Footnote ¹⁴ The Ramakian, for example, is a Thai rewriting of the Ramayana that has been accepted as an exemplar of classical Thai literature. I would not be surprised if many Thai do not realise that the epic is in fact an important scripture in Hinduism. In my own case, it was not until I was an educated adult that I realised that Nithan Isop and Inao were not Thai.

Translation from a foreign language into Thai involves predominantly sense for sense and not word for word. The accuracy that is demanded of academic translation is not the concern of most of the early translations. Translators have exercised a wide range of agency in adding to, subtracting from, or changing the stories they translate.Footnote ¹⁵ For example, the Ramayana has been re-written, re-interpreted and re-formatted, so that as the Ramakian, it has taken on a new life to celebrate the royals and not the gods as in the original Hindu text. In fact, each Southeast Asian version of the Ramayana reflects its own local history and cultural specificity.Footnote ¹⁶

Postcolonial scholars like Tejaswini Niranjana and Gayatri Spivak focus on the power relations involved in translation.Footnote ¹⁷ Niranjana is concerned with how translations ‘inform the hegemonic apparatuses that belong to the ideological structure of colonial rule’.Footnote ¹⁸ This is because domination is carried out by the state apparatus. Spivak, on the other hand, highlights how colonial translation is a way to reconstruct or to rewrite the image of the colonised as an inferior culture. Through the process of interpellation, a term coined by the French Marxist theorist Louis Althusser, the colonised internalise this inferiority and thereby perpetuate the myth of inequality. Vince Rafael, in his book Contracting colonialism, however, takes a different tack. He documents how the Tagalog use ‘mistranslation’ as a strategy to resist Spanish hegemony.Footnote ¹⁹ Rafael's work differs from Niranjana's, even though both are interested in the subjectivity of the colonised, in that Rafael theorises that retranslation or mistranslation existed widely during the colonial period. The agency of the colonised to mistranslate may have puzzled the Spanish priests, but it was logical to the Tagalog.

The study of early Thai translations of western literature can gain from Rafael's conceptual framework. Even though Siam was never directly colonised, the imposition of extraterritoriality by the 1855 Bowring Treaty compromised its sovereignty. Thus scholars have conceptualised Siam as a semi-colonial state to try to make it fit into the conceptual framework of colonised Southeast Asia. Although the debate about how to situate Siam in postcolonial studies is still unsettled, I would argue that even as a semi-colonial state or a crypto-colonial state (a term coined by Michael Herzfeld), the Thai had control over cultural production that served their own needs and not those of the hegemonic colonial powers. In this instance, I would also argue that translation was a way to cushion the impact of western domination.

The policy of urging translations was first announced by King Chulalongkorn in 1886 as a way to improve education and knowledge about the west.Footnote ²⁰ The discourse of resistance was expressed as the necessity to keep abreast of the best achievement of khwam than samai [the latest achievement of human civilisation] regardless of where it originated. Asian humanistic culture was to be replaced by western culture that emphasised rationality, science, and industry. Beginning with King Mongkut, Siam's leaders wanted to acquire the west's superior scientific and industrial achievements together with the cultural forms that supported those achievements. But the Thai would only select what was best and most appropriate for them through translation or adaptation.

Translation, interpretation and rewriting are processes that appropriate what is transformed as one's own. Thai translators do not always see themselves as technicians of language, but as artists, authors and composers. It is not unusual to see authors list themselves as such and not as mere translators. In fact, the first Thai author/translators exercised freewheeling agency by including their own stories and ideas that exceeded what was actually in the novels themselves.

Another way to theorise translation is to consider it as the vernacularisation or localisation of knowledge — turning something foreign into Thai. The historian David Wyatt has made a strong argument that the emergence of what he calls the ‘vernacular kingdoms’, which invented their own writing in the late thirteenth century, facilitated and precipitated the vernacularisation of idioms of art, literature, and music. This is why one can distinguish, for example, Buddha images that are Indian, Thai, Burmese, or Khmer. The vernacularisation process in literature when applied to the novel, therefore, makes translated novels ‘Thai’. His colleague O.W. Wolters equates appropriation to localisation, whereby what is foreign becomes fractured, restated, and drained of its original significance before being reconstituted with a new subjectivity.Footnote ²¹

Translation is also a way to educate readers about other cultures. Many leading Thai intellectuals such as Phraya Anuman Ratchathon and Prince Wachirayan had farang patrons to help them with English and to understand Europe.Footnote ²² But for the rest of the middle class, translated stories provided easy access to help them know the west and other cultures. Moreover, many translated works wrote into their compositions the equality or even the superiority of Thai culture over western culture and practices. For the Siamese, translation was an appropriation of western knowledge that helped to boost the Siamese sense of self-assurance, cosmopolitanism and understanding of the benefits and pitfalls of modernity that would prepare them to deal with the encroaching west. Even though it was clear that the west was superior in many aspects, there was no need for the Siamese to feel totally inferior. To emulate the west did not necessarily mean to submit to the west. ‘Knowing the west’ through translation could be an effective strategy to help prepare the Siamese to resist western hegemony.

The outlets for these translations were the numerous magazines that began publishing in the early 1900s. The names of these early magazines provide a clue to how western knowledge was to be appropriated. Lak Witthaya (1900–02) means ‘to steal knowledge’, in other words, ‘to plagiarise’. The first novel in the Thai language, Khwam phayabat, was serialised in 1901 in this magazine. Thalok Witthaya (1900–05), meaning ‘to expose knowledge’, may have been the single-handed work of Luang Wilatpariwat/Khru Liam, who edited and wrote most of the articles using numerous pen names. His translation of She [Sao song phan pi] appeared in this magazine.Footnote ²³Thawee Panya (1904–07), or ‘to double knowledge’, published Rama 6's Nithan thong in. Phadung Witthaya (1912–15) meaning ‘to nourish knowledge’ was a magazine published by the Sino-Thai paper Chino-Sayam Warasap.

The first decade and a half of the twentieth century marked a time when the literate and urbanising public became interested in learning more about the west. European emporiums were opened to sell western goods. The educated class even began to subscribe to English papers and magazines. Hollywood films began to appear. Perhaps more importantly, King Chulalongkorn made two trips to Europe in 1897 and 1907. The king's trip was widely publicised and the art work, dining sets and other exotic European goods he brought back caused excitement among his subjects.Footnote ²⁴ The educated Siamese fascination with foreign cultures seemed insatiable. The novel helped meet these needs.Footnote ²⁵

More than a translation: Khwam phayabat

When Mae Wan's Khwam phayabat was published as a single volume in 1902, it caused quite a stir among the Siamese educated class. Although English had been taught in Siam since the Fourth reign, it was not that widespread. The publication of Khwam phayabat in the vernacular meant that the literate and urban Thais were able to gain direct access to an English novel. Stealing knowledge – that is, plagiarism – indeed exposed western knowledge to the Thai readers.

Khwam phayabat was the first full-length novel about ‘exotic’ Italy easily accessible to the Thai audience. It provided an important window for the Thai to get a glimpse of European life. This thirst for knowledge about the west was reflected in the publication boom of subsequent translations of works by Corelli, Rider Haggard, Alexander Dumas and Arthur Conan Doyle.Footnote ²⁶ In fact, many translations were published but the original authors or manuscripts were difficult to ascertain because the Thai translators left out this important information.Footnote ²⁷

In a sense, the Thai version of Vendetta is the translation of a novel written in English by an English author about Italy and Italian values. The author, whose real name is Mary ‘Minnie’ MacKay, claimed a fictitious relationship to an aristocratic Italian musician (hence the name Marie Corelli) to ‘translate’ Italian culture and language into English. Following suit, Phraya Surintharacha also assumed the fictitious ‘feminine’ name of Mae Wan to translate the English translation of Italian culture and morals. Therefore, Khwam phayabat is a translation that is twice removed from Italy, exposing the Thai readership to Italian culture translated through the lens of an English novelist.

Mae Wan frequently inserted his own voice into the translation to explain these differences to his Thai reader. For example, the European custom of kissing a lady's hand was explained as a form of greeting. But Mae Wan also told the reader that the English do not practise this. In fact, many of the early translated novels, such as Phraya Anuman's Soraida, included explanatory notes about these strange European customs.

Mae Wan's translation thus directed the gaze of the Siamese outwards to see European hegemonic culture in a different light. Europeans were shown to be different, quaint and peculiar. They seemed to have strengths and weaknesses universal to mankind. Their humanisation made them less different from the Thai.

Thai cultural practices were also written into the novel to show superiority. For example, the novel begins with the main character, Count Fabio Romani, telling the reader that he was writing from the grave; that is, he is dead and buried. In fact, he was not yet dead when his friend Guido, who lusted after Romani's wife, had him buried. Count Romani was able to escape from his coffin to plot revenge on his wife and former friend. Even though the original novel discusses cremation as a good way to dispose of a corpse, Mae Wan embellished the discussion by explaining to the Thai reader that ‘dead’ means that the person has already been sent to the wat [Buddhist temple] and the corpse has already been already cremated.

But more importantly, he asked, ‘Why haven't people all over the world followed our Thai custom?’ This question appears on page three of the novel, keying the Thai reader to the possibility that Thai culture is equal to other world cultures. Not only is this tactic a way to draw in the Thai reader by invoking something familiar, it provides resistance to other cultures by placing the Thai on a par, or in this case above, other world civilisations right at the outset of the novel.

Of course, for the story to work, Count Romani had to be buried alive and later to escape from his coffin and crypt (translated as hong suey — a Chinese grave long familiar to the Thai reader). Romani was able to escape from his family crypt and change his appearance and his name to Count Oliva. He returns to kill Guido in a pistol duel and remarries his unfaithful wife, Nina. The story ends when he lures Nina to the family crypt to reveal his true identity. Tragically, Nina is killed when one of the stones in the crypt becomes dislodged and crushes her. The violent deaths of the adulterer and her lover are depicted as justified revenge in Italian culture. But Mae Wan also inserts a Thai sentiment into the equation. In explaining Nina's death, Mae Wan explains her demise not just in terms of a vendetta, but in terms of Buddhist karmic retribution. That is, her death was not caused by her husband, it was the consequence of her own transgressions, her own bad karma.

A close comparison between the original and the translated version also reveals the liberal use of the translator's licence to include and to exclude. For example, Mae Wan ignored and excised most of Corelli's railing against the state of European morality and ethics. But Mae Wan rewrote the ending of the novel to place Siam front and centre on the world stage. After the death of Guido and Nina, Count Romani disappears from Italy. In the original story, he sets sail for the jungles of South America. But in the Thai version, he books a passage on a ship to Singapore then changes to another ship which takes him to Krung Thep Mahanakhorn Amorn Rattanakosin, the official name of Bangkok. Mae Wan cleverly inserted the word ‘this’ to describe Krung Thep as a hint that Count Romani, acting as narrator, was recounting his story from his home in exile somewhere in Siam. This final (re)writing de-centralises and provincialises Europe by making Siam a worthy place for a rich Italian prince and perhaps others like him to take refuge and asylum. Bangkok becomes a modern cosmopolitan city where a European can become lost among the many who reside there. It places Bangkok on par with the other great cities of the world.

The First original Thai novel: Khwam mai phayabat

Although Suphanni, Wibha, and other literary scholars agree that Khru Liam's Khwam mai phayabat is considered the first novel to be composed by a Thai, too little was known about it in the mid-1970s to allow for its consideration as part of the canon. In fact, few had been able to read it until it was rediscovered in 1997 and republished in 2001 and 2002. Thus analyses of this novel that appeared in most influential texts extrapolated from its title that it must have been a parody of Mae Wan's Khwam phayabat. In fact, until it reappeared, literary scholars believed that Khru Liam composed his novel soon after the publication of Khwam phayabat. We now know that it was written 13 years after, in 1915. And perhaps because it was believed to have been written to rival Corelli's work, it was therefore seen as derivative and unworthy of the canon. As a derivation of a European novel, it was, ipso facto, less than authentic Thai.

The impetus for Khwam mai phayabat was the republication of Khwam phayabat in 1913 together with the promulgation of the Literary Act of 1914.Footnote ²⁸ The 1914 Act was an attempt by Rama VI to nationalise the novel by making it more Thai. The Act deplored the state of Thai literature, in which authors used improper language influenced by foreign grammar and punctuation; compositions were imitations and translations of non-literary European novels; and acknowledgements of the original author and title were absent.

In response to the 1914 Literary Act that also urged writers to produce good Thai books, and the republication of Khwam phayabat, the publisher of Rong Phim Thai saw a business and a nationalistic opportunity that could be met with the publication of an authentic Thai novel. He hired Khru Liam to write a novel that was anything but farang. Although he preferred a Thai novel, it is interesting to note that he was unconcerned if it was Indian. He specified that the title of the new novel had to be Khwam mai phayabat.Footnote ²⁹

If we are to use the reasons cited by literary scholars for why Lakhon haeng chiwit, Luk phuchai and Sattru khong chao lon are considered the first authentic Thai novels, then Khwam mai phayabat should also be one. How could it not be so when the author was Thai, the language was Thai, the setting was entirely in Siam, all of the main characters were Thai, the issues covered in the novel were critical ones for that period, and the moral fabric of the plot was based on Thai Buddhist teachings? In fact, Khru Liam proclaimed in his preface:

The only reference to Khwam phayabat is in the first few pages of the novel. Chapter 1 is titled ‘The Sweet taste of non-vengeance’. It begins with the Buddhist proverb that one should vanquish anger with non-anger and that one should win over ill will with goodwill. The first sentence of the novel claims that the farang relishes the saying ‘revenge is sweet’, but that the sentiment is in fact misguided and counterproductive. Khwam mai phayabat or The Non-vendetta sets out to prove the opposite. It is the story of how a Thai man overcame his anger and the need for revenge by adhering to the superior Buddhist concept of forgiveness. Unlike Fabio who killed his adulterous wife and her lover, Nai Jian forgave both.

Although the novel is a romance with a happy ending, it has a Thai twist. The hero is Nai Jian, a sentimental young man who has returned from a short study period in England. He has a rough time keeping a job and finding a wife. But with the help of his mother, Jian finds the beautiful Mae Prung, who lives with her retired parents in a ban suan [home among the orchards] in khlong bang sai gai [chicken intestines district canal] outside of Bangkok. The Thai reader can easily identify where this is because bang sai gai is (still) a district in Thonburi. Only the Thai would call a place the ‘chicken intestines’ district! To escape her rural surroundings, Mae Prung seduces the hapless Jian. They marry and live at first with Prung's parents. Soon, Prung pesters her husband to move to Bangkok.

In Bangkok, the beautiful Prung is transformed from a country belle into a glamorous city debutante who is paraded around in automobiles on the newly constructed city boulevards. She has turned into a vain and spoiled ‘modern’ woman, possessed by men for ‘show’ and for sexual pleasure. Prung eventually falls prey to the allure of the bright lights and the promiscuity of the rich urbanites. She leaves her dull husband for Khun Phak, a sophisticated and rich but uncouth villain. But because Jian is such a moral person he rescues Praphai, Khun Phak's teenage daughter who had been sold by her father to a dirty old man. Jian is rewarded with the gratitude of Praphai, a girl half his age. They become lovers.

A few years later, Mae Prung, no longer beautiful and suffering poor health from an abortion, is discarded by her lover. She returns to ask Jian for forgiveness. Prung repents by becoming a Buddhist nun with Jian's sponsorship. But through the good-heartedness of Jian's young lover, Mae Prung is nursed back to health. Jian's forgiveness is also transformative, for it restores Prung to her former beauty. With the urging of Praphai, Jian takes Mae Prung back as his wife again. Because he was not vengeful, he is rewarded with two beautiful wives, riches and status. The novel ends when both women become pregnant.Footnote ³¹

Although it is not difficult to make a case that the novel has literary merit, this novel is the first to raise an alarm about the negative moral effects of modernity and urbanisation. As social commentary, Khwam mai phayabat is more important than the three canonical novels published in 1929. Khwam mai phayabat criticises the decline of morality in modern Bangkok society of 1915. The consumption of western technology, expensive food and alcohol, leisure sites, and public sensuality undermined traditional Thai values. Young Thai women, regardless of their upbringing, easily fell prey to the allure of a loose and promiscuous lifestyle of the modern westernised woman. At the same time, the novel also identifies exemplary Thai men and Thai women who adhere to good Buddhist teachings, and who still value the integrity of the family.

The controversy over whether to marry a westerner or a westernised woman is a theme that was made famous by King Vajiravudh's novelette Huajai chai num [A Young man's heart], written in 1921. This theme became the centrepiece of Lakhon haeng chiwit (1929) and more explicitly in Sattru khong chao lon (1929). However, Khru Liam's Mae Prung represents a more threatening example of what modernity can wreak on the unsuspecting Thai woman than those in Lakhon or Sattru. Unlike the women in those two novels, Mae Prung is neither a farang nor a Thai woman who has been spoilt by studying in America. Mae Prung is merely an average, everyday Thai woman who is easily corrupted by a modernity imported from the west. If concern for critical and universal human conditions is a criterion for inclusion into the canon, Khwam mai phayabat easily meets that test.

Hybidity, mimesis, and bi-culturalism: Nang neramid

Khru Liam's Nang neramid [Created nymphs], written shortly after the publication of Khwam mai phayabat in 1916 should also receive consideration for the canon. I became aware of the existence of Nang neramid while doing research on Khru Liam. Suphanni confirmed the existence of Khwam mai phayabat by citing an advertisement found in another novel, Nang neramid, written by Nai Samran, the same pseudonym used by Khru Liam when he wrote Khwam mai phayabat. Suphanni mistakenly believed that Nang neramid was another translated novel.Footnote ³²

Several things became obvious to me after reading the novel. First, it seemed to be a translation but was not. Second, the description in the opening scene looked familiar. Third, the novel imitated an English adventure story. Fourth, it contained similar salacious, lewd, and humorous scenes also found in Khwam mai phayabat. Lastly, the ending seemed too bizarre for a farang story, but not for a Thai one. I had to conclude that Nang neramid was an original Thai novel composed by Khru Liam emulating or pretending to be a farang novelist. The provocative postscript tells all. Khru Liam writes:

If the statement above is true, then Khru Liam must have authored many novels that were passed off as translations. It also appears that the reading public did not have much faith in the ability of a Thai author to write a good novel, nor was it ready for a Thai novel that focused on the underbelly of Thai society. Readers, it appears, would have preferred farang novels about other cultures. In Nang neramid, Khru Liam subverts this popular notion by becoming a farang-like professional writer, no different from Marie Corelli or H. Rider Haggard, to deliver what his audience wanted — a story of adventure in exotic Egypt. The joke is on the reader who after reading 400 pages of a purported translation is told that he will never find the English original because there is none!

Compared to Khwam mai phayabat’s 730 pages, Nang neramid's 399 pages is relatively short. Despite these limitations, Khru Liam was intent upon entertaining his readers by transporting them to a foreign and exotic land promising a story of adventure, intrigue, magic and the occult, fighting, romance, seduction, mummies, and a heavy dose of eroticism. In both novels, however, Khru Liam inserts Buddhist values into the plot to put his Thai readers at ease and to make the stories more accessible.

Although I cannot say for certain whether any other original Thai novel was published immediately after Khwam mai phayabat (finished on 4 August 1915), I will assume Nang neramid (completed on 29 July 1916) to be the second original Thai novel; that is, a novel composed by a Thai author in the Thai language. The fact that it imitates the farang novel should not make it less Thai. Khru Liam was doing what authors before him had done; that is, writing about another culture as if it were his own. To repeat, Khru Liam was emulating his European models, Marie Corelli and Rider Haggard. The former, an Englishwoman, wrote about Italy; the latter, an Englishman, wrote about Arabs and Egyptians in Africa. Why then should not Khru Liam, a Thai, write about the English in Egypt? The only twist here is that Khru Liam was compelled to make his readers think that Nang neramid was a translated English novel of adventure and mystery, something that could have been written by Rider Haggard. But after the revelation in the postscript, would his Thai readers accept that Khru Liam was a clever author, or merely a Thai ‘passing’ as farang?

To me, Nang neramid is a genuine Thai novel about some English, Egyptian, Arab, and Negro characters in Egypt. Indeed, that the characters of Nang neramid are only foreign suggests that Khru Liam realised that Thai readers would rather be transported to another world to learn about those Others. Aside from Europe, Thai readers were fascinated by the adventures in backward Africa, by the sensuality of Arabia, and by the daringness of English adventurers. It was much later that Luang Wichit Wathakan would write an African adventure in his novel Huang rak haew luek [Sea of love, chasm of death] (1949) where Thai characters would have their own adventures in Africa.Footnote ³⁴

It should be noted here that Sao song phan pi, a translation of Rider Haggard's She, was also reprinted in 1916, perhaps close to when Nang neramid was published. This meant that the Thai public was able to compare the two novels side by side. Of course, the perceptive ones would have noted that Nang neramid was a ‘Thai novel’ about Africa and Egypt, and that Sao song phan pi was a Thai translation of an English novel about Africa and Egypt.

Because Khru Liam hastily wrote Nang neramid to recoup his lost investment in Khwam mai phayabat, he inevitably borrowed ideas from his translation of She. Khru Liam's adaptations from She are unmistakable. Both novels have English heroes, that of She being Ludwig Horace Holly, who studied mathematics at Cambridge; and that of Nang neramid being James Billford, who studied classics at Oxford. Both went to North Africa; both dealt with the occult. One met up with a sorceress, the other with a grand wizard. Both stories focus on the immortality of women.Footnote ³⁵

Nang neramid tells the story of the adventure of a young English scholar James Billford on vacation in Egypt. During his explorations of ancient ruins and caves, he and his friends discover well-preserved mummies, mostly of young and beautiful females. It turns out that a Moslem Arab high priest had discovered a way to revive mummies to sexually please men, especially the priests. These mummies are so alluring that if a man touches them, he will be forever lost in lust. The more sex these revived mummy nymphs have with men, the more carnal and the more desirable they become. The Arabs also abduct Billford's fiancé Lydia intending to kill her and to later revive her as a nymph. Eventually, Billford and some friends infiltrate the Arab ashram to rescue Lydia. They are backed up by an English expeditionary force that engages the Arabs in a battle.

The ending of Nang neramid is especially comical and unserious, something that usually appears in Thai popular fiction. The final battle between the English and Arabs is halted when a volcano erupts, sending out electrical charges that revive all of the female mummies who then wander onto the battlefield. Soon English, Arab, and African combatants become engrossed in a massive sexual orgy with the revived nymphs. The English commander surveys the mess on the battlefield and laments that there is no way anyone can fight ha praweni; that is, the heavy onslaught of the sexual intercourse plague or storm. In this case, rampant carnal desire has taken over the lives of the men. After the orgy is over, the nymphs all turn to dust, the soldiers become impotent warriors, and the battle dissipates. In the end, Billford and Lydia find each other and after collecting the queen's jewels to sell, the two return to live a lavish life in England.

Rider Haggard and Khru Liam depict women differently. The sorceress in the novel She is still full of lust, thoughts and feelings of endless desire. Ayesha is still looking for her long-departed lover and is scheming to get him back even after 2,000 years. Her love is obsessive. She is a jealous lover who has killed the man she loved. Despite her beauty, no man can trust a woman like her. In contrast, Khru Liam's own version of the immortal woman in Nang neramid appears to be an imaginative construct of the male sexual fantasy. The Arab high priest creates divine nymphs in Nang neramid by reviving beautiful female mummies. Once revived, the divine nymphs have no emotions except those given to them by their lovers.

The revived female mummy nymphs are devoid of namatham [subjective truth], and only exist as rupatham [objective truth]. All namatham is acquired from lovemaking and sex. The revived female bodies are like empty vessels that exist as rupatham that only absorb the lust of men as content (namatham), which is reflected back at men who are their lovers. But if the nymphs are overused as sexual objects, they will disintegrate into a pile of bones. Khru Liam seems to be playing to the male kilet [lustful desire] for pure sex — sex without guilt, and sex without attachments. In fact, the nymph after a period of time will have more lust and eroticism in her than one man can satisfy because she has stored in her namatham the lust of several men, or several sessions of lovemaking. These ideas, although expounded by the Englishman Billford, resonate with the Thai audience familiar with Buddhist concepts of form and subjectivity, and the dangers of uncontrollable kilet.

Although the magical aspects are present in both Nang neramid and in She, Khru Liam inserts into Nang neramid stories about insatiable sexual appetites and the role of women as objects of desire. But unlike his first novel Khwam mai phayabat, where Thai women are victims of male desire, in Nang neramid, they are revived Egyptian women. Lustful desires (kilet) and the control of these desires are central themes in Buddhist teachings that are familiar to the Thai reader. The fact that in the novel, all the Englishmen, the Arabs and the Africans fall prey to uncontrolled sexual desires implies that they are morally weak.

The novel also highlights the malleable sexual other, the stereotyping of Arab and Negro male sexual appetite and prowess, the binary of male sex drive and female responsiveness, and how sexuality can be conditioned by the objective and the subjective self. Khru Liam also racialises sexual behaviour. Both Arab and Negro men are depicted as driven by sexual desire. The difference is that the Arab priests enjoy the indulgence of sex and understand restraint, but their Negro servants are too lustful to know how to be gentle or when to stop, thereby wasting the nymphs and turning them quickly into dust.

To provide comic relief, a common trope in Thai melodrama, Khru Liam makes fun of Muslim men. In the novel, the Englishmen who secretly joined the Arab cult were worried that they would have to be subjected to latthi khao sunao — the Muslim practice of circumcision. Also as an insider's inclusive wink to his Thai readers, Khru Liam describes how after discovering the mummy of the beautiful queen, Billford decides to lop off her head as a souvenir. This grisly act and lack of fear of strange occurrences in the pyramid are dismissed by Billford who proclaims, ‘We are farang; we are not afraid of phi [ghosts].’

In this novel, as well as his first novel, Khru Liam writes openly about sexuality, which to him was not necessarily pornographic. The orgies in Khwam mai phayabat were realistic ones that could have taken place in hotels, in the private rooms of restaurants, and in secret love nests of the rich in Bangkok society. Those orgies were organised by immoral Thai men in an increasingly immoral society corrupted by modernity and urbanisation. In that novel, only Nai Jian, the moral Buddhist man, was rewarded with legitimate sexual relations with his two wives. In Nang neramid, however, uncontrollable lust destroyed both the English and Arab forces together with their African allies.