Thai Ratthaniyom: Erasure of the Patani Malay Race

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Phibun Songkhram (birthname Plaek Khittasangkha), an Army Lieut. Colonel and key conspirator in the Siamese coup d'état of 1932 (who later promoted himself to Field Marshall) became Siam’s Prime Minister in late 1938. Holding on to the posts of Defense and Interior Ministers as well, Phibun consolidated power by sidelining all rivals (either killed, jailed or banished) and ruled Siam with an iron fist. A rabid fascist with a strong admiration of the Axis Powers of the 1930s, Phibun pursued the cause of Siamese nationalism to its traumatic extreme. Siam was renamed Prathet Thai (ประเทศไทย) or Thailand. Thai (ไทย), meaning “free” is a play of the homonym for the T’ai ( ไท ) ethnic group, which in its various incarnations made up the majority of Siam’s population. Hence, Thailand means Land of the Free, but metaphorically it is the Land of the T’ais.

Phibun was bent on creating a homogenized, socially cohesive populace in a unitary state guided by Central Chao Phraya T’ai culture and Theravada Buddhism. This quest for racial and cultural purity a la Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was embodied in Phibun’s infamous Thai Ratthaniyom or Thai Custom Decree of 1939. This policy subsumed inhabitants of incorporated territories (Malays, Khmers, Lao, Shan, Mon) into the “Thai” ethno-cultural yolk and forcibly assimilated Thailand’s substantial immigrant Chinese population. Phibun’s Thai Ratthaniyom shook the foundation of the Patani Malay world. Apart from being forced to become “Thais,” the Malays were also compelled by law to shed their traditional clothing for Western attire. In a real-life theatre of the absurd, previously sarong-clad Malay peasants sported Dick Tracy hats and ill-fitting Fred Astaire suits and pants while the womenfolk stumbled in their gowns, skirts and hats while laden with other accouterments of Western civilization. Meals must be consumed with western utensils while seated on tables. Chewing of betel nut was a national crime.

Thai cultural police roamed the nation, striking errant citizens with 10-foot bamboo sticks with impunity. The Malay clergy (the tok guru, imam and ustadz) were particularly targeted. Their insistence on donning traditional garbs were met with violent chastisement by Thai authorities, including the public shedding and stomping of their garments by the culture police. The Malays wondered why this ruling was not applied to Buddhist monks as well; why tolerate the robes and slippers (if any) while compelling the Islamic clergy to forego their robes and sarongs and semutars? These cultural and social dichotomy afflict Thailand’s administration of the Malay provinces until today and cannot be reconciled by a state that refused to admit Thailand’s pluralistic reality, where large populations in different regions are distinct from the archetypal T’ai of the Central Chao Phraya.

State-Decreed Dress Code

A Thai Ratthaniyom era (1938-45) poster directs the Thai public on the “civilized” form of dressing. A laid-back Patani Malay man in traditional songkok and sarong (far right of left picture) is transformed into a dapper chap in crisp pantaloon, shirt and safari hat. Womenfolk attend to their daily chores in glitzy blouses and skirts while a boy (previously depicted buck naked now scurry along in Western garb straight out of a Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogue.

Photo: Public Domain per Section 4 of the Thai Copyright Law, 1994.

This institutionalized assimilation also regulated personal names and systematically Thai-cised the age-old Malay geographic names of the Patani Region. Hence Jalor, Menara, Singgora, Tanjong Mas, Sebayu, Gersik, Tiba, Setul, Bendang Setar, Tabal and Penarek (all perfectly lucid Malay place names) were bizarrely transliterated as Yala, Narathiwat, Songkhla, Tanyongmat, Sabayoi, Krue Sae, Thepa, Satun, Bannang Sata, Tak Bai and Panare, rendering the names meaningless and hilariously absurd to the Malays and reflected the inherent elocution limitations of the Thai pali script. Thai names became a condition for public employment. During the height of the Ratthaniyom era, Malays were forced by Thai forces to prostrate before Buddhist sacred objects in national events. In all public schools, Buddha statues were prominently displayed, and Malay Muslim students were forced to bow to them as a patriotic act. Malay language and script were strictly banned in government affairs and public usage. Malay culture was suppressed. Shari’a law and its court system were abolished. Traditional Malay and Islamic legal traditions on marriage and inheritance were supplanted by Thai civil jurisdiction. Patani history was erased and replaced with Thai-centric revisions laced with mythical heroic conquests of the Patani region by ancient T’ai kings through the ages. The term “Malay” became politically incorrect and was officially suppressed. “Thai” and Thai-ness were the epitome of patriotism.

Metamorphosies of the “Thai” race

Phibun Songkhram’s Thai Ratthaniyom (Thai Customs Decree) of 1939 enforced punitive assimilationist measures to compel ethno-cultural conformity and to subsume Siam’s plurality of ethnic groups into a concocted “Thai” race modelled on the T’ai ethnic group of the Chao Phraya River basin. “Thai” means “Free” and is actually a cunning play of the homonym for the dominant T’ai ethnic group. The Patani Malays, as the most divergent ethno-cultural and religious group, were particularly affected and resisted till this day the erasure and supplanting of their ethnicity with a generic “Thai Muslim” tag.

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The Patani Malay race, hence, morphed into the conceptual community of “Thai Muslims” -– effectively placing the indigenous Patani Malays into the pot of immigrant Pakistani, Indian, Hadramaut Arab, Cham and Haw Chinese muslims languishing on the fringes of the mainstream “Thai” social order. The Malays became “foreign” on their own soil. Since “Malay” must be erased from the public consciousness, the Patani Malay dialect was referred as Yawi, which is nothing more than an ill-informed street Thai corruption of “Jawi,” the Arabic-based Malay script used in the Patani Region and Malaya. This would be equivalent to denoting the Russian language as Cyrillic (the Slavic script) and signifying the Thai language as Pali.

The devastating fallout of the Thai Ratthaniyom policy on the Patani Malays has almost no parallel in the contemporary global order. Hence, the societal impacts may be difficult to fathom. In the Western sense, the equivalent trauma would be for George Bush to suddenly wake up in newly renamed Washingrad, Washingburg or perhaps Wah Shing Tung; forcibly detached from his family by an arbitrary international frontier straddling the Potomac River (where the American way-of-life prevailed on the other side); compelled by law to change his name to Georgi Bushev or Joerg Busch or Chee Ok Bok; forbidden to write or speak English; and gets beaten by a 10-foot bamboo stick for not swapping his suit and tie for a kilt or perhaps a robe. The surrounding towns and place names on his side of the Potomac frontier assumed weird sounding foreign names and the police and government officials would converse with him in a foreign tongue not even remotely resembling English while they smack him with bamboo sticks each time he uttered an English word. Instead of being a WASP American, he would be told that his race no longer exist and he would be assimilated into the stylized ethnicity of the invader (in this parable, lets call them “Zoltrons”). To differentiate him from the real Zoltrons (lets assume they worship other deities), he would be termed a Zoltron Christian. Would George Bush – or any human being on earth – take these gross violations quietly? Wouldn’t any society rise up to stop this outrage? Didn’t the world endured two World Wars to stem this sort of menace by rogue regimes? Why should the Patani Malays be any different?