Reviews 299

events in Southeast Asia is well written and thought provoking. In this case, these
events overshadow the book’s subject. Unfortunately, the author’s search for Jim
Thompson the political, or “ideal” man, turns out to be a chase after a mirage.

Jeffery Sng

Isan Writers, Thai Literature: Writing and Regionalism in Modern Thailand by

Martin B. Platt (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press; and Copenhagen:
NIAS Press, 2013). ISBN: 978-9971-69-697-9.

In Thailand today everyone knows that Isan

refers to northeastern Thailand, but the term
is understood by urban people differently
from those who live, or have their roots, in
the region. For most urban middle and upper
class people, Isan is assumed to mean a place
of uneducated and unsophisticated country
people who speak an unrefined language
(primarily Lao). In the political rhetoric of
the 21st century, the khon isan (คนอิสาณ), the
northeastern people, are often symbolized as
stupid water buffaloes. What Platt succeeds in
doing in this pioneering work is demonstrating
that for at least half a century there have been
a number of men and a few women who write
from their own experience of a mainly rural
world where most people speak as their native
language a dialect of Lao or, in some cases, of
Khmer, but who write in the national language and whose contributions are to the
national literature of Thailand.
What makes a writer an “Isan” writer? This is a question that Platt pursues
throughout his book in which he examines some two dozen writers whose published
work appeared in the second half of the 20th century. First, a modern Isan writer is not
one whose education was gained as it was traditionally, in a monastic school, and who
learned to write in Lao, Khmer or what is called tuatham (ตัวธรรม) (literally ‘dhammic
script’), an orthography once used for Buddhist texts not only in northeastern and
northern Thailand, but also in Laos. Rather, a modern Isan writer writes in standard
Thai, the language he or she learned in a government school. Secondly, although a
modern Isan writer may draw on the traditional literature of the region – legends
incorporated into sermons given by monks or used as the basis for performances of

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300 Reviews

folk opera, môlam mu (หมอลำ�หมู)่ – the modern Isan writer situates himself or herself
with reference to novels, short stories, and poetry that has been composed by other
writers in standard Thai. Finally, in contrast to traditional or modern môlam whose
audiences have always been primarily people from northeastern Thailand, “few Isan
writers, especially those working at the end of the 20th century, saw themselves
as writing specifically for other Isan people….Isan writers recognized that their
audience was the Thai reading public in general, and thus their goals were primarily
to educate outsiders, to bring about social and political change (and thereby to
improve the conditions of Isan) or simply to assert the presence and significance of
Isan.” (230) An Isan writer, Platt concludes, is typically one born in, and who usually
grew up in, northeastern Thailand and whose “writing is related to Isan,” (226)1
Some writers who originally came from northeastern Thailand, like the highly
published Kanchana Nakkhanan (กาญจนา นาคนันท์) (b. 1921), have not been identified
as khon isan and have written only a little about northeastern themes. Platt includes
her as one of the first Isan writers, because in some of her stories her portrayal of rural
people – based on those in the Northeast – shows these people “worthy of sympathy
and respect.” (48) Two other writers who are a little younger than Kanchana –
Khamsing Srinawk (penname, Lao Khamhawm) (คำ�สิงห์ ศรีนอก / ลาว คำ�หอม) (b. 1930)
and Khamphun Bunthawi (คำ�พูน บุณทวี) (1928-2003) – whose work has been based
much more on their own Isan experience are recognized as foundational Isan writers.
Khamphun’s work, and notably Luk Isan (ลูกอีสาน), his most famous work, is at once
autobiographical and what I would also term ethnographic in its detailed depiction
of rural Isan life; “in its humorous, reduplicative non-linear characteristics [Luk
Isan] recalls the techniques of Isan/Lao oral arts.” (126) In contrast, Khamsing, who
was influenced by Western scholars associated with the Cornell project of the 1950s
for whom he worked, is more analytical in his approach, wanting as he said “people
with power in the cities to understand and sympathize with people like Nai Nak
Na-ngam,” a northeastern villager who is the main character in one of his stories
(quoted at p. 57). He influenced the Isan and other writers who came to be associated
with leftist movements in the 1960s and 1970s.
By the mid to late 1960s, Thai society had undergone a radical socioeconomic
transformation. In the post-Second World War period, the Thai economy boomed as
a result of the marked increase in Thai exports – mainly of rice and other primary
products, the extremely large transfers of aid from the United States, and the side-
effects of the American war in Vietnam, including the establishment of American
military bases in Thailand and the servicing of hundreds of thousands of GIs on
‘rest and recreation’. An increasingly larger percentage of rural northeasterners –
first male, and then also female – found temporary and sometimes, more rarely,
1
The volume published by the Isan Writers Association, สาบอีสาน: รวมเรืองสั้นของนักเขียนภาคอีสาน
(‘Scent of the Northeast: Collected stories by Isan Writers’) [พระนคร]: เคล็ดไทย, 2551, might well be
read as a companion volume to Platt’s book.

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 Reviews 301

permanent work in Bangkok. During this period when Thailand was under a military
dictatorship, there was marked corruption and no political will to institute policies
that would have ameliorated the growing inequalities in wealth between Bangkok
and rural Thailand. These inequalities became the concern not only of a growing
student movement, but also of writers who took as their responsibility producing
stories to promote attention primarily to the plight of rural people.
These writers took inspiration from Jit Phumisak, the Thai philologist, historian,
and Marxist, who was killed in 1966 while fighting alongside the Communist Party of
Thailand. Jit had argued that literature and art should serve the people, a proposition
that was taken up by writers under the banner of “Literature for Life” (wannakam
pheua chiwit / วรรณกรรมเพือ่ ชีวติ ). In the 1960s and 1970s, most well-known Isan
writers became identified with this movement.
Platt discusses several of these writers, including Surachai Janthimathorn ​(สุรชัย
จัรทิมธร) (b. 1948) and Prasert Jandam (ประเสริฐ จันดำ�) (1945-1995). Surachai, who
came from the minority Khmer-speaking people of Isan, had acquired an impressive
ability as a writer in Thai of short stories, poems and songs, and used his ability “to
speak forcefully against injustice and the suffering it causes.” (86) After the coup
of 1976 when the student movement and its supporters were forcefully repressed,
Surachai “went to the jungle”, that is, he joined the revolutionary movement led
by the Communist Party of Thailand. He, like many others who joined the ill-fated
communist-led revolution, became disillusioned with the party and, after an amnesty
in 1980, returned to society. His subsequent writings evolved from revolutionary
themes to manifestations of the “growing regionalism in Thai literature.”
Prasert, a Sisaket native, in his numerous books and poems made himself
“almost synonymous with Isan writing, political struggle, and Literature for Life”
(86) in the 1970s. Although his life was short, since his death he has become a legend
as people have “rediscovered his writing and associated him somewhat nostalgically
with the golden age of political activism and literary presence on the national stage.”
(105)
The shift away from seeking the revolutionary overthrow of the Thai political
system to the quest by Isan people to become recognized as full citizens of Thailand,
with the right to help choose the leaders who govern them, was foreshadowed in the
writing of Khamman Khonkhai (คำ�หมาน คนไค) (b. 1937). Platt notes that Khamman’s
primary interest “is education and teaching,” (127) as is manifest in his well-known
Khru Ban Nơk (ครูบา้ นนอก), “Village School Teacher,” a book made into a film and
translated into English by Gehan Wijewardene and published as The Teachers of
Mad Dog Swamp. The teacher in a Thai government school in rural Isan holds a
very critical position serving, as I have shown elsewhere, to reshape Isan villagers’
identity so that they come to see themselves as Thai citizens, but with a distinctive

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regional character.2 Khamman’s writing dramatically pursues this theme.

Platt shows how Isan writers such as Yong Yasothorn (ยงค์ ยโสธร) (penname
of Prayong Mulsan) and Fon Fafang (ฟอน ฝาฟาง) (penname of Wira Sudsang), who
both emerged from the late 1970s on, embraced a regionalism (thơngthin niyom
/ ท้องถิน่ นิยม) that seeks to identify, discuss, and assert the value of Isan artistic,
historical, linguistic, and local cultural products as significant components of the
cultural heritage of Thailand. By the end of the 20th century, the fact that newer Isan
writers such as Phaiwarin Khaongam (ไพวรินทร์ ขาวงาม), the winner of the prestigious
SEAWrite Award, Prachakhom Lunachai (ประชาคม ลุนาชัย), winner “of all the major
Thai literary awards except the SEAWrite Award,” (192) Manote Phromsingh (มาโนช
พรหทมสิงห์), “among the most promising of the new generation of Isan writers,” (197)
see themselves as contributing more generally to Thai literature, and not only to a
regional literature, has made the category of Isan writers less clearly demarcated
than it was in the 1970s.
Platt’s book, with its exceptional combination of critical readings of a large
body of Thai literature by Isan writers, interviews with many writers, and insightful
reflections on how these writers have developed in the turbulent decades of late 20th
century Thailand, has made a unique contribution to the understanding of writers
with roots in the distinctive region of northeastern Thailand. One looks forward to
Platt writing a new chapter that examines Isan writers in the era that began early in
the 21st century with the rise of the populist politics most associated with Thaksin
Shinawatra. As support for these politics is very marked among northeasterners,
one would expect that a newer generation of Isan writers would be shaped not only
by general trends in Thai literature, but also by the experiences of the Red Shirt
movement and the conflict with those of the Thai middle and upper classes.

Charles Keyes

2
See “The Proposed World of the School: Thai Villagers Entry into a Bureaucratic State System,”
in Reshaping Local Worlds: Rural Education and Cultural Change in Southeast Asia, ed. by
Charles F. Keyes. (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies), 1991, pp. 87-138.

Journal of the Siam Society, Vol. 102, 2014