A white elephant in Hindu and Siamese culture is a holy animal. The Indic people used these sacred animals for war, transport, hunting and ceremonial processions. Some communities began worshiping the elephant and even depicted the Hindu god Ganesha or Ganesh as a multi-dimensional deity. Unlike other bovine creatures, like cows and bulls, elephants are hardly ever consumed as food. Rather, the royal Thai elephants were used for sacred and symbolic purposes. Today royal Thai elephants are used in military ceremonies, but no longer used for war. Ordinary Thai elephants are still used as work elephants: to transport logs and heavy objects as well as for ecotourism. The use of animal imagery was an important element in ancient Hindu rituals. These were transmitted to Hindu settlements in Southeast Asia such as Borobudur, Angkor and Ayutthaya. We begin our understanding of the making of modern Thailand by revisiting the Indic and Brahmanical traditions that comprise the composite of symbols of the modern Chakri Narrative, the story of how Rama IX (Bhumibol Adulyadej) and his family came into power. Without making too fine a point, the study of Hinduism and Buddhism in the Siamese and Thai celestial universe remains a critical topic of study and research.1
In the Hindu mythology of the Bhagavadgita, Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the zoomorphic Hindu god Ganesh is often depicted as a single-tusked (sometimes blue-coloured) elephant. He was originally a human being who was decapitated by Lord Shiva, another god, who believed that Ganesh was preventing from being with his wife, Pavarti. However, sensing that Pavarti was saddened by Ganeshâs decapitation, Shiva sent his troops to search for the first living creature that they could find. They returned with the severed head of a war elephant. Shiva attached the head to the body of the decapitated Ganesh and brought him to life as the iconoclastic Ganapathy, or âleader of the troopsâ. Since then, Ganesh or Ganesha is not only part of the Chakra wheel metaphor but also the defender against evil and the lord-accumulator of wealth. There are many other stories that depict the lives of the gods in the Mahabharata, which is a sacred text that is part of ancient Siamese and modern Thai Theravada Buddhism.2 This book takes into serious consideration the argument that Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX) was the demi-god of the Thai people. How does one prove or disprove the moral disposition, fact or falsehood of a mortal being with immortal powers? Rama IX was also perceived as a Chakravartin, an ideal ruler who is fair and benevolent across his domain Survanabhumi. The word Survanabhumi is a location in Krung Thep, but also sounds like the Sanskrit Sarvabhauma (the reign).3 The similarities in the pronunciation and the spelling should not be taken as causal but as two phrasal correlates, the presence of one not necessitating the existence of the other. They just sound similar. Although I would like to infer that the similarities are more than just semantic.
A gulf of difference exists between Siamâs literary history and Siamese literary criticism as well as the historiography of Siamese literature. A metalanguage is the language of analysis that is used to describe or evaluate another language. The metalanguage used to analyse the politics of any place and culture is as important as the concepts that are used in the analysis. In this book, it is important that readers accept English as the metalanguage used to analyse the history of Siam and Thailand that is written in both Standard Thai Language (STL) and in other languages such as Portuguese, Chinese, Dutch and, much later, in English.4 While the ethnographic landscape in Krung Thep itself is not bound by the city limits, neither are the people limited by the events and spaces that they inhabit. But this does not mean that there were no unique symbols or practices, tastes, smells, passions and emotions that are central to ancient Siamese culture. I have used the words Tai (meaning: people), Thai (meaning: free) and Siam (STL), Siem (Khmer) or Syam (a Sanskrit word with a racial overtone for âbrownâ or âdark-skinnedâ people) as accurately as possible. But the word âTaiâ also refers to an ethnic identity: a nation, language and culture that existed during the Lanna-Tai and Sukhothai eras. Scholars therefore associate the origins of Siamese with the ancient Ayutthaya Empire that comprised the Tai and earlier Sukhothai kingdoms.5 The idea of Siam as a community of Tai speakers is also historically intertwined with an ancient Mon kingdom known as DvÄravatÄ« that probably existed from the seventh to the tenth centuries around the modern city of Lopburi and extended all the way south to the Gulf of Siam.6 Portuguese records of Ayutthaya reveal how they were the first Europeans and foreigners to use the term Siam to describe the Ayutthaya kingdom, where they had their envoys, diplomats, warriors, seamen, monks and other medieval Catholic missionaries. In his work on The Origin of the Tical, a certain Dr J. de Campos asserts that the word Siam was used by foreigners for five centuries (making the Portuguese the first claimants to that linguistic origin) while the locals referred to their country as Muang Tai. De Campos claimed that the Portuguese word for Siam was a derivation of the Chinese word Sien or Sien-lo, meaning the area to the south of Sukhothai and Savankolok near Lopburi.7 Therefore, Tai derived from the movement of Chinese people into the heart of mainland Southeast Asia with two main kingdoms developing in the north (Lanna-Tai) and the south (Sukhothai). Both recombined eventually through a series of bloody wars with the Mons, Khmers, Pagan (Burmese) and foreigners to form the Ayutthaya Empire. The traditional enmity between Siam and the Khmer Empire even led to the naming of a sixteenth-century city Siem Reap, âdefeat of Siamâ, in Angkor history,8 a medieval hydraulic city designed with medieval hydrographical technology.9
The word âTaiâ was thus used to describe the people who lived during or after the official renaming of the country on 23 June 1939 and then again on 11 May 1949 during the period widely accepted as the era of âdespotic paternalismâ.10 Society, politics and culture under Rama IX was akin to life under a great white elephant and mango trees. Modern Thailand has bountiful resources, hard-working people, a deep and mysterious culture and millions of people living in poverty while a few thousand Thai people continue to live in extremes of wealth. The Thai power elite own most of these âmango treesâ but the choicest and most valuable fruit belong to the king.
Thailand is therefore a country of many contradictions. The Ninth Rama himself was a highly beloved character within the Grand Chakri Narrative â the ideological system that transformed and protected the monarchy for seven decades. The Ninth Rama was a highly divisive political actor who played a central role in the economic development and political transformation of the kingdom. His 70-year survanabhauma oversaw 18 coups, an ongoing Islamic insurgency and thousands of politicians and generals rise and fall under the grace of the king. Mysticism, sacrifice, political opportunism and draconian lĂšsemajestĂ© laws also marked his survanabhauma. Rightly or wrongly, the Chakravartin Rama IX will always be cherished by the Thai people as a benevolent king, a sacred being and a sentient demi-god. But the story of the Ninth Rama draws far more deeply from the resources of Siamese history. This chapter sketches the international relations of Siam from the fifteenth century onwards and explains the impact of the 1932 coup on the security and survival of the kingdom. It shows how Rama IX rose from a weak, constitutional monarch to become the longest-reigning, wealthiest and most powerful monarch in late modernity.11
Freedom, justice and liberty in Thailand
The concepts of freedom, justice and liberty need to be briefly explained as they undergird basic themes in this book. Siamese and Thai cultures represent an eclectic mix of Hindu and Buddhist philosophies. We turn to political philosophy to understand how freedom keeps escaping from the making of modern Thailand. What does it mean to be free? This is a simple question with many complex answers. Philosophers have wrestled with the idea of freedom for centuries. Most philosophers might argue that there can be no single definition of freedom. Regardless of how freedom is defined, all forms of freedom appear with opportunity costs. Our decisions sometimes lead to the denial of freedom to others so that we can be âfreeâ. This raises the question of whether one ought to take a course of action if it denies freedom to another person. Should one reflect on the outcome of decisions before taking them? Freedom or liberty involves the acting out of different factors. These include desire, passion, feeling, emotion, force, reaction, progress, self-preservation and survival. Another word for freedom is liberty. There is a wide-ranging debate on what liberty is and what it ought to be, as well as how it can be developed and preserved in society. While scholars tend to disagree on the âwho, what, where, when, why and howâ of liberty, there seems to be some general agreement that liberty (in all its theoretical variations) is a critical ingredient in human societies. Most scholars, though not all, tend to argue for the importance of liberty. Associated with liberty is the concept of justice. Justice is vital for human interaction.
Most governments advocate systems of justice, whether they are socialist, communist, autarchic, theocratic, authoritarian or democratic. There appears to be a certain sense of justice at the individual level, and hence in each one of us. This can be seen especially when it comes to situations where someone is being unfairly treated or bullied; the underdog, the weak, the downtrodden and the impoverished all raise our sense of justice, injustice and indignation. Our sense of justice is a value that is imprinted on us, a cultural DNA acquired through education where one perceives that there ought to be a basic form of fairness for all human beings. This may take the form of John Rawlsâ notion of redistributive justice as fairness through a moral blindfold or Robert Nozickâs idea of libertarianism in a minimalist state where coercive elements are used only for police protection, national defence and the administration of courts of law. This brings into play the ideas of several Western liberal thinkers. For Nozick, the moral libertarian undergirds inalienable individual rights. Another scholar, Isaiah Berlin, introduced the notions of positive and negative liberty. âPositive libertyâ is freedom to while ânegative libertyâ is freedom from, where the former may be understood as the freedom to exercise free thought and speech, freedom of mobility and freedom to act without infringing another personâs freedom. On the other hand, the latter concept of ânegative libertyâ is about freedom from coercion, threat and duress. Negative liberty, according to Berlin, is also about taking a course of action or making a decision that does not reduce the liberal rights of another person. But are there differences between freedoms and rights? Both concepts are often mistakenly defined in terms of the other, such as âfreedom is about the exercise of basic rightsâ or âliberal rights involve the exercise of basic freedomsâ. Such definitions that are made out of circular arguments should be avoided. It is acceptable to use one or the other term in a sentence, but not both at the same time as this would lead to conceptual confusion. The first 14 Amendments to the US Constitution are known as the Bill of Rights. The framers of the Constitution and their successors did not use the phrase âbill of libertiesâ. While civil liberties are supposed to contain rights, it is also true that political liberties similarly contain rights. One can speak of the right to abortion, the right to sexual preference or the right to freedom of speech (but not the liberty of abortion, for example). One can also talk about the freedom of speech, the freedom of mobility and the right to equal access. Rights and liberties or liberties and rights are part and parcel of the same set of values that are believed to be part of modern (not classical) democracy. American theorists believe that rights and civil liberties can be enshrined in the Constitution or through an Act of Congress. These would include the Bill of Rights and such laws as the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s in the United States.
Thai people are aware of latent concepts of freedom, justice and liberty. Yet Thailand does not have a democratic tradition like the United States and the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, Thai people have shed blood like the Americans and British in their endeavour to attain democracy when viewed from Western modernity. The political violence of the 1960s and 1970s in Thailand, for example, may be reduced to the fight between rights for the wealthy, conservative, âold moneyâ, middle-class elite, on one hand, and the impoverished masses from the rural north-east and southern provinces, on the other. A Thai manâs exercise of an individual right may cause the same right to be denied to another Thai man. One Thai womanâs liberties may be suppressed in order to allow for another Thai woman to exercise her liberty. A particular course of action taken by one individual or group may deny the liberty or freedom of another individual or group. Politics in this case becomes about who gets to decide whose rights or liberties are more important or crucial than others. One way that nation states have taken is to decide on their national interests. The problem with the vested national interest argument in determining individual or group rights is that it tends to lead to ultranationalist, right-wing po...
