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VERY THAI: In this regular column, author Philip Cornwel-Smith explores popular culture and topics related to his best-selling books Very Thai and Very Bangkok.
Recently, Bangkok’s Malay muslim heritage has been in the cultural spotlight through an exhibition and movie that delve behind the shrouded history of Bangkok’s Malay enclaves along Saen Saeb canal.
Mark a map with the 194 mosques of Bangkok and the densest swathe of dots form, appropriately, a crescent. Muslim enclaves are most concentrated around the canal route of Khongs Mahanak and Saen Saeb, which arc from the city wall, past the muslim silk-weavers of Ban Khrua, and northeast through the districts of Bangkapi, Nongchok and Minburi. Along that waterway – or the adjacent airport highway – just count the minarets.
Prayer time at the mosque. Photo by Philip Cornwel-Smith
Muslims have been one of Bangkok’s biggest minorities since its founding, and now number around 600,000. They come from various sects from all over the Islamic world, mostly grouped in the old town or downtown, including descendants of Persians, Chams, Indians and Javanese, or the latest wave of Arabs and Africans. Those in the Saen Saeb crescent are mostly Malay – and it’s they who are having a moment in the spotlight through an exhibition, a walking tour, two new books, and the movie The Cursed Land.
The Cursed Land is a cultural horror movie set among Thai Malays. Photo courtesy Neramitnung Film
Canal of a Hundred Thousand Stings
SAC Gallery recently hosted the exhibition ‘From Patani To Bangkok: the Journey to Saen Saep’ by Prach Pimarnman, who explored his dual identity as Bangkok-born Muslim who’s lived in the Deep South. “Saen Saep gives us a broad picture of holding onto something and not letting go,” says Prach. He presented the objects like archaeological artefacts: “to see the consequences, the displacement, the problems that are hidden, the holes, the changes, and then reflect that everything has a hidden dimension.”
Light projecting through cuts in a food cabinet formed the shape of a land deed. Malay Bangkokians own a lot of land. Their ancestors were granted plots along Khlong Saen Saeb – but only after being brought there in chains and made to dig the 72km-long canal. That ordeal might explain its name, which means Canal of a Hundred Thousand Stings.
Calls to prayer amid the condos
Some Saen Saeb Muslims have sold their land for real estate. Yet swaths of Bangkok still have semi-rural kampongs of Muslims in sarongs or hijabs. Urban villages retain dense knots of houses with caged songbirds on the verandahs.
Located in Sukhumvit Soi 39, SAC held a walking tour to the nearby Baan Don community in a village so unlike Sukhumvit’s suburbia. Three times more people joined than expected. Local experts guided us around Masjid Darul Muhsineen and along the canal to the cemetery and the traditional home and Islamic school of a local grandee. His father was a Chula Ratchamontri, the formal representative of Muslims to the Thai state.
In a panel talk at the gallery afterwards, human rights advocate Pratubjit Neelapaijit challenged middle-class Bangkok Muslims that their affluent privilege is a curse, which disconnects them from the strife of their brethren in the Deep South.
Baan Don community on Khlong Saen Saeb. Photo by Philip Cornwel-Smith
Deep legacies of the Deep South
The Deep South seems like a forsaken land today, but its rich heritage as the Sultanate of Patani was largely erased. Older than Siam, this prosperous port had earlier been the Hindu civilisation of Langkasuka. Patani also controlled the portage trade across the peninsula between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and was known for its spices and agricultural prowess. The exhibition featured larder cabinets and rice because Patani Malays were brought to Bangkok in the reign of King Rama III partly to farm crops for the city.
This cultural bridge between the Thai and Malay realms had for centuries resisted Siamese rule until it was split between seven rajas in the early 1800s, and finally dissolved into Siam in 1902. It’s now divided into four provinces, only one of them named Pattani, with two Ts from Thai pronunciation. Tales from that era feature in the highly researched historical novels by Paul and Yuangrat Wedel, Beads on a String and, its just-released sequel Dark Karma.
Offerings of Golden Flowers
Treasures from old Patani feature in a new book, Malay Silver and Gold, an overlooked craftsmanship despite Malay sultanates being what author Michael Backman wrote had been “the most powerful commercial group in Southeast Asia.” Patani gave tribute to Siam every three years in the form of a bunga mas (golden flower).
At SAC, Prach recreated bunga mas using gold and broken pottery (symbolising the smashed legacy). Their shape incorporated a naval anchor as the stamen of a hibiscus, the floral symbol of Patani.
Projecting The Cursed Land
The exhibition also featured a wrought iron anklet, visible only through an obscured reflection. Contested tales tell of how Patani Malays were brought to Saen Saeb while roped together by anklets. This appears in the film The Cursed Land, when the lead actor (Ananda Everingham) suffers a stigmata wound in his ankle whilst possessed by the angry djinn of a rebel Malay who’d been executed while digging a canal. The trail leads back south to ancient lore in Narathiwat.
The film offers a fresh cultural spin on the ‘haunted house’ genre. Buddhist outsiders inadvertently unleash djinns, who aren’t ghosts of people, but a parallel society of good and bad Muslim spirits attached to humans, animals and things like trees.
“What I have experienced is beyond my spiritual realm,”
says a monk drafted to exorcise the djinn.
“It’s another system.”
It remains to be seen whether djinns will be accepted into the repertoire of Thai supernatural characters.
Its director Panu Aree and screenwriter Kong Rithdee had earlier made documentaries together about the Bangkok Muslim experience. Khaek: In Between probed the identity of longtime citizens being branded khaek (guest). Baby Arabia profiled a band of that name from suburban Nonthaburi who play at festival times.
Digging up Roots
“The origins of embracing one’s own identity lead to a deep, sometimes distorted state,”
Prach cautions. But since the 1980s, other ethnicities have been tentatively unearthing their roots that were smothered by uniform Thainess. The Lanna Renaissance has reconstituted traditions that preceded rule from Bangkok, where migrants have also recreated northern festivals. Pride in Isaan’s Lao-ness brought movies that had to be subtitled for Bangkok audiences. Mon culture resurfaced in festivals, museums, and preserved villages like Bang Kradee. Most prominently, long suppressed Chineseness came to be celebrated through novels, soaps, festivals, urban pop design and the trendiness of Chinatown, as seen in the current hit movie, Lahn Mah.
Amid these neo-traditional flowerings, each revival has required reconciling historical trauma. Making the Thainess omelette involved breaking some ethnic eggs. Curiosity at one’s origins isn’t an effort to remake those old eggs, though, but to understand the ingredients that went into the recipe.
One Curry, Many Flavours
SAC held a tasting of festive delicacies from Saen Saeb Malays, including hybrids from their acculturation into Thainess like Mussaman curry. This Thai staple was possibly introduced in the 17th century by the ancestor of the Bunnag family, Sheik Ahmad Qomi, from Persia, where an archaic term for Muslim, Mosulman, is the likely source for its name.
Gaeng Mussaman became so popular that King Rama II extolled the dish in a poem, and in 2011 CNN declared it the world’s best dish. Made authentically with beef, its flavour profile evokes gravy-like Malay curries, and its aromatic dried spices had entered old Siam via Patani. Malay enclaves still have their own recipes, some with potato, or pineapple, or the eggplant in the recipe from Ekamai that we were served.
Mussaman is joined in Thai cuisine by other localised Muslim dishes like sate, khao soi noodle soup and khao mok kai biriyani. Many don’t realise that about 70% of Thai ingredients are registered halal, because Thailand has become a major exporter of halal food. Muslim culture is embedded in “Buddhist” Bangkok. There’s no surer place that different kinds of Thais can find common ground than over a meal and a scary movie.
Rare serving of Bangkok Malay festive dishes at SAC gallery. Photo by Philip Cornwel-Smith
The Cursed Land is screening around Bangkok.
Baby Arabia will be screened on August 5 at Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand.
From Patani To Bangkok: the Journey to ‘Saen Saep’ by Prach Pimarnman. The exhibition has ended by images and text can be seen online at https://sac.gallery/blog/58 and in Facebook/SAC, https://sac.gallery/blog/58-from-patani-to-bangkok-the-journey-to-article-panich-tangwichitrerk-photo-marisa-srijunpleang/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2QHoh4l5qCocz2gY1KrhITHiS7FUpIiVD-lAr9mki-DB90hGDiuXQZsj4_aem_QUZh2lWABExWlrEuPQWFwA
Malay Silver and Gold: Courtly Splendour from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Thailand by Michael Backman (River Books, 2024), is available from leading book stores and River Books LINK
Beads on a String (River Books, 2021) and Dark Karma (River Books, 2024) by Paul and Yuangrat Wedel, are available from leading book stores and River Books LINK.
This twice-monthly column, Very Thai, is syndicated by River Books, publisher of Philip Cornwel-Smith’s bestselling books Very Thai: Everyday Popular Culture and Very Bangkok: In the City of the Senses. The views expressed by the author of this column are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Koktail magazine.
