As the time moved closer to 5pm, there was widespread understanding that the procession was imminent. The various vehicles that infrequently passed by were looking increasingly important. Finally, a glittering motorcade appeared in the distance, the headlights sparkling in the late afternoon sun.
Everybody in the crowd went silent and the only sounds left were of birds fluttering around the trees that line the street at Sanam Luang. As the procession came closer, the importance of the moment became palpable. Silent tears began to trickle down faces as the procession began to pass by. The first two vehicles were a car and an unexceptional looking van. This was then followed by a string of luxurious royal cars.
At the head of the royal motorcade was the cream coloured car of the Crown Prince. Despite being sat on the opposite side of the car to where we were sitting, he was in clear view, as if he was sat in a higher position than the other occupants. He looked solemnly forward, his face softly lit in grief. In the next car, this time sitting on our side, Princess Sirindhorn, stared out at the crowds. She didn’t wave, but instead looked slumped, leaning into the window with a sad, almost pained expression. The royals, as with the rest of the crowd, appeared to be caught in a private moment of grief.
As the rest of the motorcade passed, the crowd remained still and contemplative. This lasted only a few seconds. Then it was gone.
Slowly people started to stand, looking at each other in bemusement. Which vehicle had carried the King? one man asked. A woman nearby, still visibly moved, said it had been the first unassuming van. This was a claim that later turned out be correct, but at the time nobody knew for sure. The people had come to grieve — and they did grieve — but the focus of their pain had passed them by with them barely even realising. As with the incoherence of the initial announcement, the procession thus provided little opportunity for public mourning.
Before leaving we said goodbye to those with whom we had shared the previous few hours. But we remained disoriented. We got ourselves a free, cool drink from a stall around the site, and joined the mass of people in black who left the area looking for a way to go back home.
The legacy
In the wake of the death of King Bhumibol, numerous articles have attempted to express the significance of his life. In doing so they have invariably succumbed to reinforcing nationalist myths about what he meant to the people of Thailand.
The management of grief following his death, both by the state as well as the people, demonstrates, however, that something else is shaping the current moment. It shows that frequent attempts over recent years to demand a love for the King, as well as efforts to label political opponents as republicans, have in many ways made royalism seem an extreme ideological form of nationalism that must be enforced by law. What was clear from the crowds of people mourning King Bhumibol was that these individuals were neither extremists nor that they were there under duress.
The private grief that has been evident in public spaces since the King passed away is surprising, partly because it so different from the bloated form of ‘hyper-royalism’ that analysts have observed as dominant in recent times. What has arguably become visible since Thursday, is an as yet undetected form of intimate, private royalism, that exists separately from, and even in response to, the more extremist public version.
The authorities’ management or mismanagement of news regarding the death of King Bhumibol, paired with the usage of smartphones and akin technologies, turned the initial stage of grief into a solitary experience for many. The intentional or unintentional lack of initiatives for channelling grief into a ‘mass experience’ further helped to facilitate the individual appropriation of the persona of King Bhumibol into people’s most private and intimate realm.
Similarly, the failure to clearly mark the vehicle that carried the King’s body during the procession to the Grand Palace resulted in the atomisation of the crowd. The lack of a visible object – a coffin or even a vehicle – for people to reify the King in his last form inevitably left them with no alternative to cling onto other than the images of the man when he was still alive and their own private memories.
The hagiographic videos that have been restlessly shown on all television channels for 24 hours a day depict a youthful and energetic monarch visiting the country’s most remote villages promoting development. Conspicuously absent are images of an ailing old king who impotently witnessed one the worst political crises in recent Thai history.
As the past few decades dissolve in memory, King Bhumibol’s ultimate legacy becomes a white canvas, upon which each and every person can paint their own image and reflect on their own personal memory of the King. A powerful legacy