Katya & The Prince of Siam

While working on the translation I gradually became totally immersed in my grandparents’ lives – their happiness and sorrow, trials and tribulations. In particular, I came to identify with my grandmother, a foreigner living in a strange land. For although I have a well-known Thai name and speak excellent Thai, my European appearance has always caused and continues to cause constant and intrusive questioning. But if it has been difficult for me to live and work in Thailand, how much more difficult it must have been for my grandmother all those years ago when Bangkok was nothing like the cosmopolitan city it is today? In addition, I identified with her as someone who had lost her parents at a young age and all the insecurities that this can cause.

Through working on the book I also learnt more about my father’s early life. I came to sympathise with his traumatic childhod and understood some of the reasons why he might not have been able to be as loving a father as I felt he should have been. Thus in many ways working on the book has been a cathartic experience for me and enabled me to reach my father and my paternal grandparents whom I never had a chance to know.

It has also impacted on my personal life as well, as the first trip I undertook with my husband Gee Svasti-Thomson, before we were married, was to Istanbul in search of the church were my grandparents were married some 80 years earlier. Having to find an old priest to unlock the church and sitting together alone in the dark interior we could almost feel their presence beside us. Another connection is that both my father and Gee’s grandfather were both in love with the same girl, who latter married Gee’s grandfather.

For my aunt, I think the book has sometimes been difficult. Just when she would think a particular section was finished I’d write or ring her with another letter, another diary revelation which I would insist had to be included. At other times with me in Thailand and her in England discussing the book has been problematic. Nevertheless, despite it all we’ve managed to stay good friends and produce a book which I hope does justice to my grandparents, who were both remarkable people in their own very different ways.

 

Narisa Chakrabongse

August 1994

I

The Siamese Royal Family

 

Katya, Prince Chakrabongse and their son Prince Chula.

 

The story of Katya – Ekaterina Ivanovna Desnitsky’s marriage to Prince Chakrabongse of Siam has intrigued me since I first heard of it in 1938, the year that their son and only child Prince Chula married my sister Lisba. Although there was considerable opposition to their marriage from my family, it was as nothing to the undisguised anger of the Siamese Royal Family when, in 1906, Chakrabongse, a son of the reigning monarch, chose a ‘farang’ – a foreigner – as his bride.

The Chakri Dynasty, rulers of Siam since 1782, had held to a strict tradition of consanguineous marriage among royalty ‘to maintain the purity of the stock’, and was shaken to the core, not so much by the fact that Katya was a commoner and an orphan without fortune, but because she was foreign. In the words of one of Chakrabongse’s full brothers, Prince Prajadhipok, ‘The marriage was a national dynastic catastrophe!’

To comprehend fully the intensity of this reaction on the part of his family, it is imperative to touch briefly on the background into which Chakrabongse was born in 1883.

Although his father, King Chulalongkorn, was said to have had ninety-two wives and seventy-seven children, his favourite wife was Queen Saowabha and Chakrabongse, one of her nine children, was one of his favourite sons. He was also the grandson of the great King Mongkut and the character and remarkable changes brought about in Siam by both his father and grandfather were profoundly to affect his own short life.

Mongkut, well known in the West through Anna Leonowens’ book An English Governess at the Siamese Court and the loosely derived musical, The King and I, was in every respect a different character from his portrayal in both. He was born in 1804, the son of King Rama II, and when he was twenty – as was customary for all male Siamese princes – he entered the priesthood for what was generally a short period of about three months. But in his case this ‘short period’ was prolonged into a sojourn of twenty-seven years, for hardly had he stepped inside the monastery doors, when the King, his Father, died without having named an heir.