Love and Death of King Ananda Mahidol of Thailand

203 Pages·2021·4.818 MB·English

by  Pavin Chachavalpongpun

Love and Death of
King Ananda Mahidol
of Thailand
Pavin Chachavalpongpun
Love and Death of King Ananda
Mahidol of Thailand
“The abbreviated reign of King Ananda Mahidol is as intriguing as tragic. Details
of Ananda’s life are inaccessible and deemed too controversial. Pavin
Chachavalpongpun excellently discusses two intertwining stories—the love and
death—of Ananda. While Ananda’s demise has remained a mystery, his romance
with a Swiss lady is unknown to Thais. Pavin explores this romance, in the context
of palace politics and the restriction on interracial marriage. It is a riveting look
into the life according to Pavin of a ‘forgotten monarch.’”
—Charnvit Kasetsiri, Former Rector of Thammasat University, Thailand
“Based in important detective work tracking information, Pavin Chachavalpongpun’s
book provides an invaluable account of King Ananda’s short life. Pavin recognises
the challenges of Ananda who was sucked into political scheming and intrigue.
Royalists have drawn a dark curtain around his life partly because his demise
resulted in the long and politically important reign of his younger brother, King
Bhumibol Adulyadej. With this critical and comparative assessment, Pavin draws
back that royalist curtain and sheds light on a fascinating but tragic reign.”
—Kevin Hewison, Weldon E. Thornton Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Asian
Studies, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
Pavin Chachavalpongpun
Love and Death of
King Ananda Mahidol
of Thailand
Pavin Chachavalpongpun
Center for Southeast Asian Studies
Kyoto University
Kyoto, Japan
ISBN 978-981-16-5288-2 ISBN 978-981-16-5289-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5289-9
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F
oreword
History is chock full of small episodes obscured by greater events, buried
by people who find them inconvenient, or just left on the floor by histori-
ans’ sharp-knifed editors, which illuminate, color, and explain those
greater events. This is one of those.
Ananda Mahidol, or Rama VIII, lived only a short time, very little of it
in his own kingdom, and left behind a very small footprint—his birth, a
number of small black-and-white photographs of his youth and teen years,
and then his sudden, violent, never-explained death at 20.
That life spanned two very different cultures, the two theaters of World
War II, and accounts of it—he was after all a king from when he was 9
years old—should be rich with detail, about his high-born father who died
young, his commoner-born mother, and his royal brother and sister.
Given that after his death his younger brother Bhumibol Adulyadej
reigned with huge success for 70 years, it is normal that Ananda would be
less remembered. Yet his story, the details of it, almost disappears between
his father Prince Mahidol Adulyadej, who died when Ananda was just
four, and his brother Bhumibol.
That is by purpose. The Thai royal family and royal court have forever
sought to closely control the histories of its members, its kings and queens,
extolling and mythologizing those whose lives serve the bigger needs of
the legitimacy and power of hereditary monarchy, and debasing others
who either mar the glorious family history or serve as foils for its greatest
members.
Ananda, in his short innocent life, fits into neither pocket. And anyone
trying to force him into one would run into obstacles.
v
vi FOREWORD
However there are, unlike with previous monarchs of Siam, indisput-
able records of his life outside the control of palace archivists. Those come
in the form of foreign government reports, media articles, photographs,
and newsreel footage, showing a happy boy growing up through the war
in Lausanne, Switzerland, and then depicting his sudden, mysterious death.
Because of this, the palace has chosen to do nothing at all with his story.
It could be both inspiring and tragic. But telling it raises far too many
deeply troubling questions of truth, law, and legitimacy, casting great
shadows over his mother, his brother, the princes of the royal court, and
the politicians and generals who led Thailand for the second half of the
twentieth century.
Yet it is a good story, one worth telling, for how it deeply figured in the
modern history of his country, from the 1932 revolution, which over-
threw the absolute monarchy through his brother King Bhumibol’s reign
from 1946 to 2016.
And it is worth telling because it is just the kind of inspiring, tragic, and
intrigue-filled tale that lovers of monarchy and stories of kings and queens
adore. Few, or course, are unaware of the popular books, musical, and
film—“The King and I”—about the fantasized love story of the English
governess Anna Leonowens and Ananda’s great-grandfather King
Mongkut, or Rama IV.
Telling Ananda’s tale, specifically of his death, was tried once, by South
African writer Rayne Kruger, in his 1964 book The Devil’s Discus: An
Inquiry into the Death of Ananda, King of Siam. Kruger was invited to
Thailand by a senior prince seeking to right the blood-stained wrongs that
multiplied and mutated through politics after Ananda’s death. Kruger’s
book was of course banned in the country, as too many people had too
much to lose by revisiting the tragedy of 18 years earlier.
And I looked at it, though without great detail, in my own biography
of Bhumibol published in 2006, The King Never Smiles—also banned.
Even in the twenty-first century, the royal edifice and Thai government do
not want outsiders writing the histories of their kings. Yet, they still don’t
truly endeavor to do it themselves. And they wield the harsh law of lèse-
majesté, banning critical comment on the royal family, to prevent anyone
unauthorized from doing so.
Pavin Chachavalpongpun, though, is no outsider. He is Thai, a former
diplomat with exposure to the royal family and royal culture, which he was
raised to venerate but later found reason to delve further behind the offi-
cial picture.
FOREWORD vii
That led him to take another look at the story of Ananda. By law it
should be fair game, as the constitution’s key lèse-majesté clause specifi-
cally protects only living royals. But in practice, it is extended to previous
kings, including, bizarrely, those of regimes preceding the current Bangkok
dynasty.
Pavin could have looked at Ananda’s death, with all of the intrigue,
mystery, and potentially disturbing conclusion that surrounds it. But that
would not tell much about the young monarch himself.
Instead Pavin chose to examine a very private and little-known tale, a
secondary school, teenage love story, that, he tells the reader, was as con-
sequential for the bigger, known story of the monarchy than perhaps any
other of Ananda’s short life. It is an unsurprising story, a simple one, of a
teenaged boy and an attractive, sympathetic girl in his school.
That he was a cosseted boy-king of an exotic country far away in Asia
makes it the kind of ill-fated royal love story that romance readers any-
where would lap up. It is, like whatever happened in the real story of Anna
Leonowens and King Mongkut, almost heresy to discuss, and the palace
archivists are of no help either.
Pavin treats it seriously, a deliberately hidden episode of history that
seems small but had great ramifications.
He does a service by rendering the young Ananda a more complete
person, a budding youth with a tough but loving mother, facing a future
in a country he barely knows, whose people have already assigned an inor-
dinate level of perfection, beauty, and indeed deity to.
With this, Pavin has given a small gift to the Thai people and monarchy,
a tale of romance that humanizes a young man with the weight of the
world on his shoulders who in life and especially in death had immense
impact, but who has been denied to this day his own story.
Paul M. Handley
Author of The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand’s King
Bhumibol Adulyadej
P
reFace
The death of King Ananda Mahidol, or King Rama VIII, in 1946, despite
a tragic incident, has been forcedly hidden from the realm of curiosity
among the Thai public. In Thailand, a country whose embodiment has
been the monarchy, the untold story of the death of King Ananda unravels
an oddity. Why has it long been a taboo to discuss the untimely death
of Ananda?
Born and raised in Bangkok, I grew up like others of my generation. We
were taught to love and respect the monarchy as a duty and an obligation.
The monarchy has thus been encapsulated within an enforced affection,
and criticism against the institution could be seen as blasphemy. The lèse-
majesté law has been put in place as a legal instrument in the prevention
of such criticism. This law stipulates that anyone insulting or defaming the
monarchy can be sentenced up to 15 years in prison. As a result, the pub-
lic’s view vis-à-vis the monarchy has long been constrained. Only extol-
ment is allowed.
During the successive reign of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, or King
Rama IX, the matter on the death of Ananda continued to be suppressed.
In fact, it was ever more so, given suspicion of Bhumibol’s involvement in
the death never subsided. But at the twilight of the Bhumibol reign, as the
end of the magical era was looming, the carpet started to roll back reveal-
ing hidden dirt. The death of Ananda has returned to the public’s atten-
tion as the position of monarchy has been increasingly contested. The new
generation, having escaped long years of state propaganda on the monar-
chy, begins to explore the death of Ananda. The ta sawang phenomenon
ix
x PREFACE
(literally cleared-eyes or brightened-eyes) accelerated that process. Many
felt that the truth behind the death of Ananda was only half-told.
Under this circumstance, my interest in the death of King Ananda was
renewed. Moreover, at a deeper level, it became a personal attempt to
break free from constraints in my own view of the monarchy. The discus-
sion on the issue of Ananda’s death still remains detrimental. A book
about it will likely be banned. Its author—myself—will likely be punished
with lèse-majesté. But my hope is that, despite imminent threats to this
personal mission, scholarship on the monarchy would be further broad-
ened. Critical works on the Thai monarchy are limited. In the past decade,
few critical academic books on the Thai monarchy have been published.
Any study of the death of King Ananda is scant. My humble intention is to
shed light on this dark aspect of the Thai monarchy.
In renewing my interest in the death of King Ananda, I revisited a cru-
cial book, The Devil’s Discus: An Inquiry into the Death of Ananda, King
of Siam. Written by Rayne Kruger in 1964, the book introduced a theory
of the death of the king. Although the case was closed following the exe-
cution of the three royal servants—two of them were present in the palace
on that ill-fated day—the Thai public continued to be bewildered by the
tragic incident. Paul M. Handley, the author of The King Never Smiles: A
Biography of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej was told that Kruger
was invited by a senior prince to write The Devil’s Discus with an intention
to initiate a new theory of the death of Ananda supposedly to divert the
attention away from any allegation that Bhumibol killed his elder brother.
This time, in revisiting The Devil’s Discus, I became fascinated by a Swiss
girl who was mentioned as a “love interest” of King Ananda. Her name is
“Marylene Ferrari,” as spelt in the book. Kruger seemed to suggest that
King Ananda might have committed suicide because he knew that getting
married with Marylene would be impossible. Therefore, The Devil’s Discus
not only opened an entry into the death of Ananda but also titillated the
readers with the romantic story that ended as lovelorn.
Regardless of the plausibility of the suicide theory, Marylene, as an
“actor” in Ananda’s short life, deserved to be discovered. But I was clue-
less of how to trace the Swiss lady. It was impossible to search for anything
about Marylene in Thai or English literature. There was some mentioning
of her in few books, but only in passing. There has been no investigation
into the life of Marylene. Her existence was as obscured as the death of
Ananda itself. It was this almost non-existence in literature that motivated
PREFACE xi
a search for her. Learning about Marylene could allow us to understand
better the case of the death of King Ananda.
The Ferrari Lady
My journey began on January 3, 2012. I wrote an article published in New
Mandala titled, “Desperately Seeking Marylene,” to resonate the 1985
Hollywood film “Desperately Seeking Susan.”1 In my article, I made a
plea to anyone who might know about Marylene to come forward and
share her story with me. Here is what I wrote:
For a few months now, I have attempted to track down a Swiss lady by the
name of Marylene Ferrari. Marylene was a supposed lover of King Ananda
(Rama VIII) whose untimely death in 1946 still remains a mystery.
I searched the Lausanne archives, genealogical records of Switzerland,
Swiss census records, Swiss church records, Swiss immigration records, and
other sources. But all these failed to locate Marylene. Then, I had a chance
to stopover briefly in Switzerland in October 2011 to try to find more infor-
mation on Marylene. I talked to local journalists as well as old friends in
diplomatic circles. It seems likely that (although I cannot confirm at this
point) Marylene, who was possibly born in the mid-1920s, could have
already passed away. It is also likely that, after the death of King Ananda, she
married a Swiss man, and that she had a grandson, named Yves, who is an
architect now living in Geneva (I have no information on her children). I
have tried to contact Yves, but so far there has been no response from him.
It is believed that Marylene wished to live a quiet life following the trag-
edy of her supposed lover. Even if Yves is really her grandchild, past records
appear to suggest that Marylene could have migrated to the United
Kingdom or the United States. But, once again, this is sketchy information.
A chance to talk to her family members about her past and her relation-
ship with King Ananda might greatly assist in enlightening the mystery that
surrounded the death of the young king. I would be grateful if anyone who
may have more information on Marylene would share it with me. My sin-
cere thanks in advance.
The following part is a summary of details of Marylene taken from The
Devil’s Discus, authored by Rayne Kruger.
1 Pavin Chachavalpongpun. “Desperately Seeking Marylene,” New Mandala. January 2,
2012. Accessed May 3, 2021. https://www.newmandala.org/desperately-seeking-
marylene/.