Research & Article

Luang Saranupraphan was one of the most prominent figures in the Thai literary world of the early 1920s, both on account of his own writings and his editorship of two journals, Sena su’ksa lae phae witthayasat and Saranukun, which attracted many famous writers of the day. As a novelist, he is remembered chiefly for Phrae Dam and Na Phi. While both of these works are regularly mentioned in biographical entries on Luang Saranupraphan and in literary histories, they are not readily accessible and probably few people today have read them. Following the publication of Suphanni Waratho’n’s Prawat kan praphan nawaniyai thai in 1976, it has been widely assumed that Luang Saranupraphan took the plot of Phrae Dam from a western movie, ‘The House of Hate’ which was shown in Bangkok a few years earlier. Since Luang Saranupraphan was vociferous in promoting his own novel as being an entirely original work, and emphasizing that it was ‘not a translation, nor a transposition nor an adaptation, in any way whatsoever,’ the link between Phrae Dam and ‘The House of Hate’, or Ban Maha Phai as it was called in Thai, is worth examining in more detail. From an examination of the novel Phrae Dam, a ‘House of Hate’ press booklet produced by Pathé for trade distribution in England, and the Ban Maha Phai set of film-books by ‘Khon Than’, it can be concluded that despite some superficial similarities, Phrae Dam and the ‘House of Hate’ are very different works and Luang Saranupraphan’s claims to originality perfectly reasonable. This paper sets out firstly to restore Luang Saranupraphan’s integrity and discourage literary historians from repeating the claim that Phrae Dam is copied from a foreign movie, and secondly to awaken interest in the career of Luang Saranupraphan.and his role in the development and promotion of the early Thai novel.