Wrestling with the spirits of the past

23 October 1996

Every 3 years, scholars from around the world gather for an international conference on Thai Studies. The sixth conference last week in Chiang Mai attracted 800 scholars from 25 nations. Panels discussed the big themes and problems of the era - globalization, cultural crisis, environment, gender, AIDS. But the three sessions where the atmosphere crackled with emotional electricity were about history—wrestling with the troubled spirits of Thailand’s recent past.

Memory. Thongchai Winichakul was a student leader in the 1970s. Now he teaches history at a US university and is acknowledged as one of the most important historians of the day. He instigated the recent 20-year commemoration of the Thammasat massacre of October 6, 1976.

At the Chiang Mai conference, a packed audience heard Thongchai describe the massacre, label it as "the state’s crime", and recount how it has become "unspeakable". Official histories leave it out. Textbooks skip round it. The authorities will not mention it. The victims are reluctant to discuss it. Most Thais accept that the event was one of the turning points of modern Thailand. But still the memory is too difficult to talk about.

The massacre was the awful climax of a polarisation between left and right, student and army, progressive and conservative, young and old. The violence of the day —shooting, lynching, burning—has made both sides frightened of provoking such polarisation and confrontation again. Thongchai promoted the 20-year commemoration to honour those who died in the massacre, to "show that we love them", and to give them a place in history. But he refused to analyse the event as a historian, to explain why it happened. If you want to understand, he said, you have to read the newspapers of 1976 and "find out for yourself".

To some at the conference, this was not enough. Surely it was the job of historians like Thongchai to read and analyse the sources for us? How can we include October 1976 into Thai history if we still don’t understand what happened and why? If the massacre was "the state’s crime", who were the criminals? The questions were passionate. But Thongchai stayed silent.

Poetry. After the massacre, three thousand students and activists fled to the jungle. Most returned four years later, when the revolutionary movement crumbled and the Thai government offered an amnesty. As Thongchai mentioned, this was a second defeat. Some reacted by publicising their disillusion. The communist organisation in the jungle, they said, had been almost as dictatorial as the army generals running the government. The communist strategy had been copied slavishly from China and was hopelessly inappropriate for Thailand.

Others who returned from the jungle kept silent about the experience. They refused to criticise the communists, or renounce their idealism.

The Chiang Mai conference held a panel of prominent women writers. Jiranan Pitrapreecha had been one of the leading writers of the student movement. After the amnesty, she was part of the group which publicised their disillusion. At the Chiang Mai panel, she explained that her writing now is dictated by emotions.

Cholthira Satyawadhna was also a prominent 70s writer. On return from the jungle, she kept her silence. She made a career as an academic anthropologist, writing with passion and idealism about the Lua people who had been her hosts in the jungle. At the Chiang Mai session, this passion suddenly spilled out against Jiranan and some popular writers present on the panel. What was the point of writing, she asked, just for emotional release or profit? Writing with no social purpose was no use to women or society in general? The room suddenly became very hot.

The argument between social commitment and emotional honesty is the oldest, commonest theme in the study of literature. What is most surprising about this Chiang Mai clash is that it had not happened before, and that no-one seemed to expect it. For fifteen years, the divisions created by the experience in the jungle had become "unspeakable" too. The silent and the disillusioned simply could not talk to one another. The radical spirit had been lost in silence.

History. In the early twentieth century, the rulers wrote a history of Thailand which glorified the rulers. Since then, this has been the official history taught in schools, and to a large extent in universities too.

Today’s students find this history irrelevant and boring. Over the last two decades, Charnvit Kasetsiri noted, the academic study of history has withered. But outside the universities and outside the official strait-jacket, history flourishes. Books sell in big numbers. Magazines like Silpa Watthanatham (Art and Culture) circulate widely. Historians write regular newspaper columns. This Chiang Mai session of historians was so popular, so jammed, many were left outside the door. It ran twice as long as any other session, and ended with half a dozen people still clamouring for a chance to speak.

This new history has flourished in the more liberal atmosphere made possible by the 1973-6 upsurge. It has, as Charnvit described, challenged the official history. Nidhi wrote studies which analysed kings "as human beings" rather than glorified heroes, and these have sold out printing after printing.

One major theme of this new history is the role of the Chinese in Thailand. Most of the historians (including Nidhi, Thongchai and Charnvit himself) have Chinese lineage. Charnvit studied the Chinese origins of the founder of the Ayutthaya kingdom. Nidhi wrote that King Taksin of Thonburi was half-Chinese. And in the preface to that book, Nidhi laid out a manifesto for "jek history" - the study of the role of the Chinese-settled-in-Thailand.

It is not difficult to see why this "jek history" has been popular. In the official version, the Chinese hardly appear. In the recent economic boom, the urban Thai-Chinese have become rich and confident. They want to see acknowledgement of their role in Thai history.

But many at the Chiang Mai session felt Charnvit was leaving something out. And once again, the temperature began to rise.

Another school of Thai history had also grown from the 1973-6 era. It has focused on rural and local history. Its best known figure is Chatthip Nartsupha. This school challenges both the official and jek versions. It argues that history is too much about kings and cities, and too little about villages and people.

This school has become bound up with grassroots political movements. It also argues that rural history is not confined within present-day political boundaries. Rather than looking at the "history of Thailand", it tries to cover the "history of the Thai or Tai" who are scattered across many countries from India to China to Vietnam.

Charnvit ignored this school. He noted only that attempts to write local history had "failed". He did not mention Chatthip’s name. When Thongchai challenged him to comment on Chatthip’s work, Charnvit evaded the issue.

Why such silence? What is the conflict that again made something "unspeakable"?

On one level the conflict between "jek history" and village history simply mirrors the widening urban-rural gap of modern Thailand. At another, the conflict again furrows back to the aftermath of 1976. The Chinese-influenced strategy of revolution had been based on the peasants. Disillusion with communism also meant disillusion with the peasants. Many old radicals came to believe that the villages were a lost cause. In both study and political action, the city represented progress. Chatthip sees industrial capitalism as a disaster, and seeks better social values in village history and culture. Opponents see this as incurably romantic.

At a deeper, even more "unspeakable" level, runs a divide between the urban jek and the rural Thai. When Chatthip’s rural history focuses on the Tai/Thai in Thailand and neighbouring communities, it stirs memories of the nationalist theories of the 1930s and 1940s. In that era, nationalist politicians and intellectuals wanted to expand the borders of Thailand to include all these Tai peoples. The same politicians and intellectuals also tried to repress the Chinese immigrants as not properly Thai.

The debate at Chiang Mai flirted with the ghosts of this outdated nationalism. Did Charnvit refuse to acknowledge Chatthip’s rural history, one delegate asked, because it represents this old (anti-Chinese) nationalism in disguise?

In all three of these sessions, the debate faltered when it hit something "unspeakable". Thongchai refused to "explain" October 1976. Jiranan would not meet Cholthira’s challenge. Charnvit avoided commenting on Chatthip. Each time, the silence allowed the thoughts and fears of others present to vibrate through the conference room, driving up the emotional temperature.

What to make of this? In the pessimistic view, the ghosts and spirits of the recent past still have no home, no "spirit house" where they can rest in peace and tranquillity. They are still wandering homeless and rejected in the forest, and as such they will continue to trouble us all.

In the optimistic view, these clashes indicate things are changing. For too long, the radical critique of Thai society has been complicated by the spirits of the past, by the rifts and silences left over from 1976. The recent commemoration has at last opened up the possibility of dialogue. These first exchanges are the immediate result. Of course they are clumsy and heated. But at least a dialogue has begun.