158
thailand
in 1926, the same year as the museum’s inauguration.20 Religious architecture and plastic arts were classified into eight chronologically sequential (though partly overlapping) stylistic periods that were named after historic polities: Dvaravati, Srivijaya, Lopburi, Chiangsaen, Sukhothai, Uthong, Ayutthaya and Rattanakosin (Bangkok). The designation of the Dvaravati and Srivijaya art periods rested on speculative grounds. The Lopburi period designated Khmer sculpture and architecture from central Siam, leaving open the question (still debated today) of whether its creators were ‘provincial’ Khmer artisans or Thai imitators of the metropolitan style of Angkor. The Chiangsean period identified the Burmeseinfluenced sculpture and architecture of the northern kingdom of Lanna. The Sukhothai period was taken to mark the appearance of the ‘national’, and indeed ‘classic’, Thai style of Buddhist imagery, thus placing the emergence of the Thai artistic genius within the broader narrative of the political ascendancy of the Thai race. This intent was well served by the distinctive iconography of the Sukhothai icons: supple bronze images of the Buddha in seated, standing and characteristically walking postures, with oval faces, hooked noses, arched eyebrows and lowered eyelids, which re
159
five: modernities
Cultural tourists in Ayutthaya, c. 1900.
elaborated foreign motifs into an original indigenous style. The Ayutthaya period was dismissed as a protracted period of artistic decline, characterized by the sterile replication of a fixed formula that reached its nadir by the start of the Bangkok period. By assimilating art styles to historical periods, Damrong and Cœdès conflated, however, the history of art with political history, relying on the former to fill the lacunae of the latter and on the latter to provide a temporal framework for the former.21 During his term as head of the library from 1915to 1933(when he went on self-imposed exile to Penang), Prince Damrong outlined Thailand’s master historical narrative by sequencing the kingdoms of Sukhothai, Ayutthaya and Bangkok as the successive incarnations of the Thai nation. Taking up Leopold von Ranke’s call to approach historical documents philologically in order to reveal the past ‘as it really was’, Damrong compared and collated extant versions of court chronicles, which he then published with lengthy introductions. In so doing, Damrong literally ‘edited’ Thailand’s past to evoke an image of the Thais as being distinguished, as he put it, by ‘love of national independence, toleration and power of assimilation’.22 Damrong also emphasized the Thais’ vocation to syncretism: ‘The Siamese do not reject the good and the beautiful just because it is of foreign origin. They borrowed the good and the beautiful features of various different styles and merged them together.’23 During the absolutist era knowledge was subjected to the royal monopoly of power, and those who produced and circulated it outside of this monopoly incurred the state’s wrath. Such was the fate of K.S.R. Kulap (1834–1921), a commoner who, after working for foreign commercial firms, established a printing press and a journal in which he published historical and biographical essays based on texts he was able to borrow from the palace library. Kulap’s publishing activity led to his prosecution on charges of forgery; convicted in 1902, he was granted royal pardon because of his age. With the fall of the absolute monarchy, the royal elite’s monopoly over the writing of history also came to an end and national history was rewritten, as Craig Reynolds puts it, by braiding together the old plot of dynasty and the new plot of nation-state.24 The rewriting of the national past took place in the domain of popular rather than academic history; its main architect was the