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chief nationalist ideologue, Luang Wichit Watthakan, who in his many historical plays interwove the themes of heroic kingly deeds and commoners’ bravery. Wichit subscribed to the view established since Wachirawuth’s reign that Thai civilization had originated with the kingdom of Sukhothai but gave it a new spin. In a public lecture delivered in 1940, Wichit contended that the Indic customs adopted from the Khmer court had a corrupting effect on the Thais: ‘Thailand was a strong and vibrant nation in the Sukhothai period . . . since then we should have made great progress . . . but it was not possible because we cast off our fundamental culture’.25 Paralleling the Fascist invocation of Romanitas as the model for modern Italy, Wichit mythologized Sukhothai as an age of robust moral and cultural values that should form the basis of the Thai nation. The spread of public education in the post-absolutist period was crucial to making hegemonic the nationalist historical narrative of the continuity of the Thai kingdom from Sukhothai to Bangkok, as school textbooks provided the main vehicle for its diffusion. The first challenge to this came in the 1950s from Thai Marxist historiography. Udom Sisuwan’s Thailand, a Semi-colony (1950) and Chit Phumisak’s The Real Face of Thai Feudalism(1957; see Chapter 4), recast Thai history in class terms as the royal-noble exploitation of commoners. Chit made a major contribution to the political and historical debate by resignifying the term sakdina as the equivalent of feudalism in his Marxian scheme of Thailand’s historical development from primitive communism (among the Tais before their migration) to slave society (Sukhothai), feudalism (Ayutthaya and early Bangkok) and capitalism (from the middle of the nineteenth century).26 Proscribed by the dictatorial regime of Sarit and his heirs, Marxist historiography attracted a great deal of interest when it re-emerged in the early 1970s. Through a more rigorous reading of Marx than Chit’s, Chatthip Natsupha and his associates in the Political Economy Group at Chulalongkorn University grounded the study of Thailand’s history into an analysis of economic structures and social formations centred on the Marxian concept of the Asiatic mode of production; the critique of the royal elite’s ‘neocolonial’ role revealed also the influence of contemporary dependency theory. Chatthip’s interest later shifted to the study of the Central Thai village, seen as a primordial communistic society