Page 109 - The lraternational Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand.indd

The International Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand
Volume XV-2023

3. Littérature engagée in Thailand before 1973
The fact that Thai socialism in literature deals more with the lives of farmers
or the poor and their fight against the bourgeoisie, and therefore, also differs from

the socialism in Europe around the end of the 1900s, illustrates the paradox of the
littérature engagée in Thailand from 1947-1955:

Many short stories and novels and “songs for life,” stimulated by Marxist
theory, demonstrated social conflicts upcountry. As Thailand was at the time a strongly
agricultural country, country life was presented as especially charming in various

novels. One of the most famous novels is Saenee Saowapong’s Wanlaya’s Love (1950):

“To conjure land for the landless and squeeze cloud bottons
to make rain fall in times of drought…”

(In the translation of Marcel Barang, 1996)

The farmers appear as “back bone, thus the mainstay for all organs, of society…”,

and they claim:

“…because they are under house registration, must report births, deaths
and changes of adresse, register their boat of they have one, and even
their buffalos must be put on the books…”

(In the translation of Marcel Barang, 1996)

The literary themes did indeed include a demand for equality between the rich
and poor in accordance with socialism, but it fully lacked the misery of the mass

proletariat. The so-called “progressive literature” or “literature for life” far more
reflected the life of the farmers on the land, and how it conformed to the real way of
life in the country. Only a systematic and scholarly preoccupation with Marxist-

socialist theories, such as that practiced by “Chit Bhumisak”, a student in the Faculty
of Arts at Chulalongkorn University, from 1995 created a stable foundation for Thai
littérature engagée in later years.

In the history of the Thai littérature engagée Chit Bhumisak is revered as the
most significant “thinker and poet”, not only because of his literary-theoretical debate

about the conception of “art”. With his essays on art and literary criticism – “What is
Art? Is there such as thing as ‘poesie pure’?”; “What is ‘l’art pour l’art”; and “What
does ‘art for life’ mean?” – Chit carried forward the pioneering work of his predecessors
during the years 1947 to 1952, particularly that of Indrayut, Banchong Banchoedsin
and Saenee Saowapong. Chit Bhumisak was a student of philology and had a very

good historical knowledge of the Thai language, the old classic languages of Pali, and

Pornsan Watanangura 101