Who was the real Jit Phumisak? The gifted linguist, willing to risk his college career arguing over a single archaic word? Co-translator of the Communist Manifesto? A radical historian who subversively upended centuries of received knowledge with a bold new history of Thailand? Poet? Composer? Loving son? Jungle fighter?
A bronze statue of socialist intellectual Jit Phumisak recently unveiled by the Jit Phumisak Foundation to mark the 47th anniversary of his fatal shooting. The statue will stand at the site where he was shot dead by villagers in Sakon Nakhon’s Ban Nong Kung in Kham Bor sub-district. APICHIT JINAKUL
Craig Reynolds, who profiled the work and life of Jit in Thai Radical Discourse: The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today wistfully noted the elusiveness of a stable identity and the distortions of narrative in biography and legend. Much of Jit's life remains shrouded in mystery; even the circumstances of his tragic death on May 5, 1966 are not entirely clear. The stirring ballad Jit Phumisak as written and sung by the group Caravan suggests that Jit was killed "under the shadow of the great eagle", and it has long been rumoured, though not proven, that US forces somehow had a hand in hunting him down, much like Che Guevera would meet his fate the following year.
There are reports that the headman of the village where Jit was gunned down was rewarded with a trip to Hawaii, but it is also possible that Jit was killed by chance encounter.
Forest monks in Sakon Nakhon are said to have been perturbed by Jit's death, not just because of the violation of life, but because the shooting took place in a protected forest area believed to be sacred and a place of refuge.
I first learned about Jit while studying Southeast Asia at Cornell University, where scholars such as Ben Anderson and Charnvit Kasetsiri lectured on the topic. When I later went to Thailand to study Thai, I found Jit's legend, as expressed in word and song, to be all the rage with politicised students, perhaps all the more so because his name and his works had been previously banned.
As a University of Michigan graduate student researching Thai literature, I took a series on one-on-one tutorials with William Gedney, who turned out to be Jit's co-translator on the Communist Manifesto.
Gedney and Jit lived together at soi Ruam Rudee near the US embassy when they embarked on the career-disrupting translation of the Marxist classic.
Even three decades after they parted, Gedney's deep affection for Jit was evident. One day during class Gedney was beside himself with emotion. He said he had been walking on a street near campus and saw a student who was a dead-ringer for Jit, and it rattled him. Nearing retirement, Gedney was a well-respected linguist with a collection of Thai books some 14,000 volumes strong. He was a quiet man, greatly aided in campus socialising by his warm, radiant wife Choi, who also happened to be the best Thai cook in Ann Arbor.
With the help of a Thai friend, I interviewed her about the years she spent with Jit as a member of Gedney's Ruam Rudee household. The Thai transcript was published by editor Suchart Sawatsri in Lok Nangsue.
Gedney is sometimes described as a key influence on Jit, but he was also curious about the influences on Jit and wondered out loud if it was an arcane academic argument with a haughty professor at Chulalongkorn University over how to best read an archaic word that marked the beginning of Jit's alienation from the establishment.
The argument, in which Jit deployed his formidable knowledge of Khmer, was about an odd word with different possible readings _ phok or phahok, a topic which has been re-examined in detail by Robert Bickner, a linguist at the University of Wisconsin.
A more dramatic turning point came a year later when Jit was rejected by his peers and school authorities for his creative but unconventional (read communist) editing of a university publication. The yonbok or "thrown on the ground" incident at Chula saw Jit subjected to a rude public interrogation by student vigilantes who invited him on stage to defend his violation of hallowed tradition in the campus auditorium, with the result that he was interrogated and then tossed off the stage as punishment, knocked unconscious.
Gedney took care of Jit during this harrowing period when friends backed away in fear and the university's commitment to free expression fell victim to anti-communist mania.
In the wake of Jit's humiliating rejection, and the insinuation of being a communist that went with it, Gedney decided to give an interview to Prachatipatai in 1953 to clear the air. Sadly, Gedney's gallant public attempt to defend a friend who had been thrown on the ground led to him being thrown out of the country a short time later.
That's not to say either of them was a communist; just standing up for American-style free speech in a Cold War client state of the US was radical enough.
Gedney served in the US Army during World War II and US governmental contacts helped him land freelance translating gigs in Bangkok. But the translations that paid the rent eventually put them out of their house. Gedney told me how he had been contracted by a "sleazy, shady character who resembled Jackie Gleason _ Bird, his name was Willis Bird" to do translations for the US embassy.
Gedney agreed to translate the Communist Manifesto into Thai if he could hire an assistant. He got the job and Jit got going on it.
That gem of US government-mandated linguistic work was ruinous to both men, leading one man to end up in jail, and then in the jungle, while the other was deported to America.
Gedney felt so betrayed by the devious hand of Uncle Sam that even 30 years later he could confide to me that he hated to see professors, at Michigan, and elsewhere, stupidly take US government money without realising the strings attached.
Gedney was a linguist first and foremost, but he did have interesting political ideas. He came of age during the 1930s Depression and the Soviet-leaning leftism of that period seems to have left a mark. One day we got talking about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which I fully expected him to condemn, but instead he welcomed it.
"It's about time they got rid of those mullahs and had some civilising influence. The people there need it."
The left-leaning linguist had ample reason to be bitter; he felt his career had been thwarted, especially at Yale and the Ivy League universities, tarred by Cold War paranoia.
Gedney related how it was that he came to leave Bangkok. He had a meeting with a policeman who placed his gun on the desk and let the barrel of the weapon do the talking, hinting that it might be a good time to leave.
A hoped-for intercession on the part of Kukrit Pramote did not materialise, nor did the US embassy help. Gedney packed his books, married Choi, adopted her children, and left Thailand, a land he clearly loved deeply, in January 1954.
The question of who radicalised whom has long been grist for ideological speculation. It's a pity, in a way, because the politics eclipses something more precious; a beautiful, deeply intellectual, mutually supportive friendship.
Philip J Cunningham is a media researcher covering Asian politics.