The Ghosts of the Past in Southern Thailand: Essays on the History and Historiography of Patani

Chapter 2: Gates, Elephants, Cannon and Drums: Symbols and Sounds in the Creation of a Patani Identity

Symbols and Sounds in the Creation of a Patani Identity  cHaPter 2 Gates, elephants, cannon and Drums: Symbols and Sounds in the creation of a Patani Identity Barbara Watson Andaya  The ongoing conflict in southern Thailand has spawned increased interest in the historical processes by which a sense of being “Malay/Muslim” as opposed to “Thai/Buddhist” developed in the contemporary provinces of Yala, Narathiwat, Satun and especially Pattani. Because these processes have been analyzed primarily in terms of the relationship between Patani and the Siamese (later Thai) state, discussions about a growing sense of “Malayness” have focused on Patani resistance to the assertion of Thai authority. This tendency, however, has raised questions about the extent to which the people of Patani felt themselves to be “Malay” in premodern times; it has recently been argued, for instance, that the juxtaposition of “Malay” versus “Thai” has only assumed prominence over the last hundred years.1 Although it would certainly be misleading to apply contemporary understandings of ethnicity to Patani’s earlier history, this chapter contends that a sense of “Patani-ness” can still be detected in pre-19th-century sources.2 While acknowledging the depth of oral memory in the Patani region, it draws primarily on the Hikayat Patani, approaching the text as a “site of memory,” a record of the participatory experiences that contributed 1 Michael J Montesano and Patrick Jory, “Introduction,” in Thai South and Malay North: Ethnic Interactions on a Plural Peninsula, ed. Michael J. Montesano and Patrick Jory (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), p. 8. 2 See Chuleeporn Virunha, “Historical Perceptions of Local Identity in the Upper Peninsula,” in Thai South and Malay North, ed. Montesano and Jory, pp. 52, 67.  Barbara Watson Andaya to group cohesion.3 The memories of these experiences — at once plural, collective, and individual — were intimately connected to places, objects and sounds that communicated compelling messages about the relationship between locality and ancestral origins.4 People and Place, Symbols and Sound The phrase “orang Melayu” (Malay people) occurs relatively rarely in court chronicles, but the customary coupling of “orang” with a place, a negeri, be it Siak, Pahang, Kedah, Johor, or Patani, testifies to the self-conscious relationship between locality and community.5 Despite its central position in the Malay imaginaire, historians have long encountered difficulties in identifying an appropriate English term for negeri and its more courtly form, negara (both introduced into Malay via Sanskrit). In appreciating a sense of “negeri-ness” as manifested in the Hikayat Patani, it is therefore useful to consider the association between spiritual forces and a specific locality as they have been described in other areas of Southeast Asia. Among the Chams, for example, certain objects regarded as manifestations of the soil deity apparently generated a cult of propitiation that formed the basis for a communal polity. A recent study of Laos similarly contends that the “power of place” is vitalized through a community’s memory of noteworthy events attached to a particularly territorial domain.6 Accordingly, while the Hikayat Patani contains no specific assertion of being “Malay,” it does convey a strong 3 A Teeuw and D.K. Wyatt, eds., Hikayat Patani: The Story of Patani (Nijhoff: The Hague, 1970), 2 vols. For references to oral accounts, see Pierre Le Roux, “Bedé kaba’ ou les derniers canons de Patani,” Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient 85, 1 (1998): 125–62. Ibrahim Syukri, Sejarah Kerajaan Melayu Patani [History of the Malay Kingdom of Patani] (Bangi: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 2002), p. 13. 4 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989): 9. 5 I wish to acknowledge the invaluable access to Malay texts offered by the Malay Concordance Project, begun by Dr. Ian Proudfoot of the Australian National University. 6 Paul Mus, Cultes indiens et indigenes au Champa, l’Inde vue de l’Est (Hanoi: Imprimerie de l’Extrême-Orient, 1934). Ian Mabbett and David Chandler, trans., “India Seen from the East,” Monash Papers on Southeast Asia, Clayton, Victoria, 1975, pp. 11–2, 15, 23; John Clifford Holt, Spirits of the Place: Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), pp. 21–53, especially 24–5; Virunha, “Historical Perceptions,” p. 67. Symbols and Sounds in the Creation of a Patani Identity  connectivity with a place, “our country” — negeri kita, as one ruler puts it...