The House of the Raja: Splendour and Desolation in Thailand’s Deep South
Forgotten in Thailand’s troubled Deep South, stands a dilapidated wooden palace once home to a Malay ruler, the last of his dynasty. Locals call it the “House of the Raja,” a place suffused with loss and solitude, laden with the region’s glorious past and tragic present. Intrigued by this demonized, little-known borderland, photographer Xavier Comas chanced upon this mysterious house and felt compelled to delve into its past. The caretaker, a Muslim shaman who held rituals inside, invited the author to stay and initiated him into its hidden dimensions. As Comas builds a bond of trust with the inhabitants of the house, the missing pieces of its history gently fall into place, revealing an ancient culture long hidden and the building’s ties to the centuries-old struggles in this contested region.
Comas’ evocative black-and-white photographs take us into a realm of hauntings, mystic powers and fading memories. His first-hand account enthralls the reader with vivid descriptions in which the real and the magical entwine. The House of the Raja provides a missing key to controversial issues of legacy, belief and identity in Thailand’s Muslim South.
RM220.00
Out of stock
Description
Forgotten in Thailand’s troubled Deep South, stands a dilapidated wooden palace once home to a Malay ruler, the last of his dynasty. Locals call it the “House of the Raja,” a place suffused with loss and solitude, laden with the region’s glorious past and tragic present. Intrigued by this demonized, little-known borderland, photographer Xavier Comas chanced upon this mysterious house and felt compelled to delve into its past. The caretaker, a Muslim shaman who held rituals inside, invited the author to stay and initiated him into its hidden dimensions. As Comas builds a bond of trust with the inhabitants of the house, the missing pieces of its history gently fall into place, revealing an ancient culture long hidden and the building’s ties to the centuries-old struggles in this contested region.
Comas’ evocative black-and-white photographs take us into a realm of hauntings, mystic powers and fading memories. His first-hand account enthralls the reader with vivid descriptions in which the real and the magical entwine. The House of the Raja provides a missing key to controversial issues of legacy, belief and identity in Thailand’s Muslim South.
Publisher: River Books Press
Hardback
2014
ISBN: 9786167339177
Coming Of Age: A Decade Of Essays, 2001-2011
House of Glass
This Earth of Mankind
The Naive and The Sentimental Novelist: Understanding What Happens When We Write and Read Novels
Conversation with Difference: Essays from TEMPO Magazine
Sea Of Poppies
The Calcutta Chromosome
60 Tahun Ekonomi Pasaran Sosial
Akira Kurosawa
Cinema at the Crossroads: Nation and the Subject in East Asian Cinema
Banana Punk Rawk Trails: A Euro-Fool’s Metal Punk Journeys in Malaysia, Borneo and Indonesia
Footsteps
Tao Te Ching
A Strangeness in My Mind
The Chulia in Penang: Patronage and Place-Making around the Kapitan Kling Mosque, 1786–1957
Malchin Testament: Malaysian Poems
Child of All Nations
Dancing The Malaysian
A Sultan in Palermo
50 Years Of Malaysia: Federalism Revisited
The Fiction of Colonial Malaya
