As Thammasat University students, ajarns, and staff know, Professor Direk Jayanama (1905-1967) contributed much to the development of Thailand as a diplomat and politician. TU also remembers him as the founder and first dean of our Faculty of Political Science. As an associate of Pridi Banomyong, he participated in the coup d’état of 1932, changing the system of government from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. After serving as minister of foreign affairs, he joined the Free Thai Movement (Seri Thai) during the Second World War. After the conflict ceased, he assumed many different ministerial responsibilities. In appreciation of these accomplishments, in 2011 the Faculty of Political Science, Thammasat University established the Direk Jayanama Research Center, to

bring about further development in research and enhance the Faculty’s ability to provide the wider society with reliable policy suggestions.

Along with these serious responsibilities, Ajarn Direk apparently never lost his sense of humor. The evidence may be found in the Professor Direk Jayanama Library at the Faculty of Political Science, Tha Prachan campus. A bookcase contains items from the personal collection of Ajarn Direk, including many serious titles about world history and politics. There is also a copy of the comic novel Summer Lightning by the British author P.G. Wodehouse. The TU Libraries own a few of P. G. Wodehouse’s many books. Like Summer Lightning, many are focused on humorous incidents at Blandings Castle, a fictional place of privilege in England. Always a favorite among readers in England and other countries such as India, Wodehouse (the name is pronounced Woodhouse) poked gentle fun at the British upper classes, making them seem endearingly silly. Ajarn Direk worked closely with British allies during World War II and later as Ambassador of the Kingdom of Thailand to the Court of St. James’s, England. His experiences there may have added to his enjoyment of Wodehouse’s humor. The most popular character created by Wodehouse is Jeeves, a valet or servant who is responsible for the clothes and personal belongings of an employer. Jeeves is so knowledgeable and able, that twenty years ago, when a question answering e-business and web search engine was founded in California, it was named Ask Jeeves (the name of the search engine was later changed to Ask.com). Among Wodehouse’s memorable phrases in his novels are the following:

• ‘The modern young man,’ said Aunt Dahlia, ‘is a congenital idiot and wants a nurse to lead him by the hand and some strong attendant to kick him regularly at intervals of a quarter of an hour.’
• I can’t stand Paris. I hate the place. Full of people talking French, which is a thing I [rule out]. It always seems to me so affected.
• He had been looking like a dead fish. He now looked like a deader fish, one of last year’s, cast up on some lonely beach and left there at the mercy of the wind and tides.
• Aunt Agatha is like an elephant—not so much to look at, for in appearance she resembles more a well-bred vulture, but because she never forgets.
• My Aunt Agatha, for instance, is tall and thin and looks rather like a vulture in the Gobi desert, while Aunt Dahlia is short and solid, like a scrum half in the game of Rugby football. In disposition, too, they differ widely. Aunt Agatha is cold and haughty, though presumably unbending a bit when conducting human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, as she is widely rumoured to do, and her attitude towards me has always been that of an austere governess, causing me to feel as if I were six years old and she had just caught me stealing jam from the jam cupboard.
• She had a beaky nose, tight thin lips, and her eye could have been used for splitting logs in the teak forests of Borneo.

South Asia and P.G. Wodehouse

Ajarn Direk was not the only Asian expert in political science to enjoy the amusing works of P.G. Wodehouse. In 2002, Shashi Tharoor, an Indian politician and former diplomat now serving as member of parliament, wrote that in his opinion, Wodehouse was the finest English writer since Shakespeare and the writer who had given me more joy than anything else in my life. The TU Libraries own two books by Shashi Tharoor: Show Business, a satirical novel, and An Era of Darkness: the British Empire in India, a history. Political scientists study the serious, and sometimes tragic, reality of nations by writing about them with exact language. It is a lighthearted escape to read Wodehouse, who wrote about comfortable people whose minor problems can be laughed at. Instead of the precise terms used in scholarly research, Wodehouse exaggerated for comic effect. To describe an elder relative in one novel, Wodehouse suggested that he looked like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow. As science students and ajarns know, pterodactyls are extinct flying reptiles known from fossils. Shashi Tharoor added:

Like many of my compatriots, I had discovered Wodehouse young and pursued my delight across the 95 volumes of the oeuvre, savouring book after book as if the pleasure would never end. When All India Radio announced, one sunny afternoon in February 1975, that Wodehouse had died, I felt a cloud of darkness settle over me. The newly (and belatedly) knighted Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves and of the prize pig the Empress of Blandings, was in his 94th year, but his death still came as a shock. Every English-language newspaper in India carried it on their front pages; the articles and letters that were published in the following days about his life and work would have filled volumes.

More people in India read P.G. Wodehouse than the mystery writer Agatha Christie or John Grisham, the bestselling author of legal thrillers. Shashi Tharoor believes that the secret of this popularity is the writer’s style, as when he describes a group of aunts bellowing to each other, like mastodons across the primeval swamp. When Jeeves coughs quietly, the sound is like a very old sheep clearing its throat on a distant mountain-top.

Celebrating the Indian admiration for Wodehouse, last year a British production of Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense, an adaptation of his stories, toured to Mumbai. Four months ago, at the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival, a five-day program in Jaipur, the capital and the largest city of the Indian state of Rajasthan in Western India, a public discussion was held, The Wodehouse Effect: Why India Loves Jeeves. The festival organizers noted:

P.G. Wodehouse continues to be one of the most popular English language writers in India with a readership that spans generations. How and why does his idyllic world and linguistic style cross notions of class and culture? Shashi Tharoor, past president of the Wodehouse Society of St Stephens College, Delhi University, journalist and author Mihir S. Sharma, author Tony Ring and journalist Swapan Dasgupta discuss the enduring mystery of India’s fascination with Wodehouse.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)