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7 Secularizing the Sangha, 1900–1935 Outside the rarefied domain of Buddhist studies, colonial perceptions of the sangha were colored by a deeper ambivalence than that shaping the scholarly mistrust of erratic scribes and inaccurate scriptures. In the 1860s, the entrepreneur L. Faucheur felt nothing short of repulsion for Cambodge’s ubiquitous monks whom he nicknamed talapoins (small, yellowish monkeys), with their shaved heads, yellow costumes, begging bowls, and hypocrisy, their ducklike walk and mendacity. Gradually , however, his feelings changed to admiration for the monks’ immersion in religion , dedication to children’s education, and observation of religious discipline.1 Others clung to their initial negative impressions. “I don’t like it one bit when I see those yellow rags bustling about near the coolies,” declares Barnot, a railway engineer in Henry Daguerches’ novel Le Kilomètre 83, published in 1913 but loosely based on the author’s tour of Battambang as a director of artillery for Cochinchina in 1908–1909. “It was a pretty astute observation,” ruminates Barnot’s partner. “Some shifty ‘yellow rag’ lay in ambush behind nine out of every ten obstacles confronting our rails.”2 In a later poem, “The Monk of Angkor” (Le bonze d’Angkor), Daguerches merges ignorance and enigma in the figure of a lone monk whose “shapeless robes” signify his detachment from desire and disdain for life, a detachment which also explains his failure to “decipher [either] the hollow architecture” or its bas-reliefs.3 “Disdain for the devoted crowd” distinguishes the monk in Maurice Olivient’s poem “Le bonze,” also published in 1918.4 These literary characterizations of Khmer monks as alternately venerable, mystical, arrogant, ignorant, and rebellious reflected the administration’s ambivalent attitude towards the sangha, whose powerful status jarred with larger colonial projects of subjugation.5 But these perceptions did not stop there. Increasingly, such literary metaphors informed policy as well as prose and verse. Much like the veil, which aroused complex feelings of fascination and discomfort over its power to obstruct the business of bodily surveillance in the Middle East, monastic robes were an intense irritant to the colonizing eye. Loques jaunes, the disparaging colonial epithet for the sangha, assumed powers of disguise and deception, their veiling function most commonly associated with issues of criminal shelter and tax evasion.6 Equally frustrating to the modern bureaucrat was the minute and concealed shape of the chhaya which each monk carried on his person as a mark of his ordination. Under Mahanikay practice, upon ordination a lay preceptor or elder monk would transcribe the chhaya on a long sliver Secularizing the Sangha : 167 cut from a palm leaf. This would then be rolled into a tiny ball threaded on cotton, encased in gum, and “threaded on to prayer beads, in such a way that it could not be opened.”7 No less galling to the agents of colonial order were the sangha’s immunity from prosecution and the moral injunction whereby “no monk may make a complaint against anyone,” which effectively debarred monks from becoming colonial informants.8 A disgruntled RSC Baudoin reported how this rigorously observed precept was a godsend to “troublemakers,” who “ask to prendre le froc or dress in yellow robes without ordination, and escape police enquiries by taking shelter in pagodas .”9 Surveillance of the Thommayuth and Mahanikay sects was made easier by the identifiable differences in dress. Indeed, it was in their confusion of these distinctions that Nath and Tath drew some of the most trenchant criticisms from more conservative members of the sangha and government.10 The tax-free status of monks also rankled, and many colonial administrators likely shared the sentiments of Ch. Lemire, who described “the excessive number of monks [as] a deadweight that continues to weigh heavily on revenues in Siam, as in Cambodge and Laos.11 The sheer size of the sangha, its resistance to administrative reforms, its close ties with monks and monasteries in Siam, and its conspicuous influence over a deeply reverent population fostered increasing unease among colonial administrators. By the early twentieth century, recognition of the sangha’s value as a pillar of the status quo, and appreciation for the reverence in which monks were held by the population, was commonly tempered by fear of their potential to turn that power against the protectorate, dislike of their “arrogance,” and contempt for their “laziness” or “ignorance.” At the root of these mixed feelings was a deep anxiety over the sangha’s existence on the margins of the secular world...

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