The life of ML Boonlua Debyasuvarn slices diagonally across the social history of 20th-century Thailand. She was born in 1911, the 32nd child of a senior noble from a core royal lineage (Kunchon). Her father was keeper of the royal elephants and manager of the royal drama troupe. While the Fifth Reign court ardently pursued modernisation, he remained totally traditional, innocent of English, scarcely literate in Thai, devoted to traditional arts, and polygamous. His drama troupe doubled as a personal harem.
A Civilized Woman: ML Boonlua Debyasuvarn And The Thai Twentieth Century By Susan Fulop Kepner Silkworm Books, 725 baht ISBN 978-616-215-061-6
As a child Boonlua was not pretty but very precocious. Encouraged by her father and Prince Narit, she developed an outspoken, prima donna-ish side to her character which never faded.
Both her parents had died by the time she was 11 and the environment of the Thai court was replaced for her by that of a Catholic convent, first in Bangkok and then in Penang. And what a change.
From Thai to English (and French), from Buddhism to Christianity, from traditional Thai pedagogy to an education in thinking, from the extended family to a multicultural community. Personally, she felt lonely and abandoned. Academically, she prospered, topping her class and learning to deal with farang society.
Returning to Siam, marriage was the conventional next step. Only much later did she learn that her family head had rejected all suitors without telling her. Probably he could not imagine a man of their class (and none other would qualify) getting along with this strong-willed, outspoken lady whose mind had been shaped by an odd combination of royal tradition and Western ideas.
History intervened. In 1932, the absolute monarchy was overthrown and the old nobility lost many of its privileges. Like most of her peers, she fiercely resented the new commoner politicians, yet they helped cause a shift towards egalitarianism that gave Boonlua a future. She was in the first class at Chulalongkorn University when it began admitting women. She followed the natural route from graduation into the public service. She found her calling as a teacher of literature, and more unsteadily made a mark as an educational administrator.
While she resented the overthrow of the absolute monarchy, she did not mind the strong nationalism and state-building of the new regime. She worked on committees implementing Prime Minister Phibun's conventions on dress, rules for civil servants and revisions of the school curriculum. While some royalists fled and some violently opposed the new regime, others like Boonlua quietly worked in the engine-room of the administration. Continuities in Thai official practice can be traced to stories like these.
With the arrival of US influence after World War II, Boonlua got a scholarship to study for an MA at the University of Minnesota. She loved the US and the freedom of being away. On her return she found an additional role for herself as a go-between for the growing number of Western scholars interested in Thailand. Among students and junior colleagues, especially women, she inspired great admiration. But like many born aristocrats, she tended to treat colleagues and bosses with condescension, and like many very clever people, she suffered fools not at all.
Her official career stalled. Constantly sickening from stress and frustration, she retired early in 1970.
If Boonlua's story had ended there, it would be a minor thread in the plot of the Siamese aristocracy's fate in the 20th century. But two things happened. First, at the age of 49, she had married a debonair doctor and divorce{aac} whom she had met through a group of Minnesota alumni. His lack of lineage would have prevented the match in their youth, but that no longer mattered. They were mutually devoted and very happy.
Second, she wrote five novels. She had always wanted to write, but her older and prettier sister Buppha had made an early splash as a novelist under the pen name Dokmai Sot, and Boonlua was discouraged by the thought they would be compared. But Buppha had not written anything new for many years.
Boonlua produced four of her five novels in the five years after her retirement. The most popular, like most Thai novels of this era, was a family story of great complexity. Unlike most others, however, it was also a political novel. The central characters were loosely modelled on Field Marshal Phibun and his wife. Boonlua damned the Phibun-like figure, not by making him the swaggering dictator of conventional accounts, but by portraying him as drearily ordinary.
Another of her novels was a fantasy set in a Southeast Asian country run by women. Her inversions of Thailand's gender politics were probably ahead of her time, but she forgot to make the book entertaining as well. In the same mercurial period, she also turned out a flood of essays on literary criticism. She punctured the mainstream view of old Thai literature as something sacred by insisting that classical and modern works be subjected to the same discipline of criticism, and by celebrating the earthier and more realistic aspects of the classical corpus.
When literature suddenly became a political matter amid the student revolts of the 1970s, Boonlua found herself invited onto public forums alongside the new firebrands. She surprised audiences by her mixture of traditionalism, liberalism, passion and personal quirkiness.
Few biographies have been written about people from this period, in part because of the lack of sources, but Boonlua and her circle wrote a lot about themselves and one another. From these writings and many interviews, Susan Kepner has crafted a fascinating "inner" story of Boonlua's development against the background of her family circumstances and the seismic shifts in Thai politics. Kepner is best known for her translations from Thai (especially Letters From Thailand and the stories of Sidaoruang), but here delivers an extraordinarily accomplished work.
Like any good biographer, she loves her subject, but does not shy from revealing that subject's arrogance, wilfulness and contrarianism.
The Thai aristocracy faced a crisis after 1932. They lost privileges and they lost purpose. Many of them spiralled downwards, clinging to past privilege and flirting with reactionary politics while gradually selling off their remaining property. A few embraced change with only a modicum of grudge, building on the cultural capital they had inherited from the old order to become prominent educators and artists.
Boonlua is a great example of the small group who embarked on this second journey. Susan Kepner succeeds in conveying the sheer complexity of her life, resulting in not only a fine biography and literary appreciation but also a unique essay in social history.
