''Sakdina'' ( th, ศักดินา) was a system of social hierarchy in use from the Ayutthaya to early Rattanakosin periods of

Thai history The Tai ethnic group migrated into mainland Southeast Asia over a period of centuries. The word ''Siam'' ( th, สยาม ) may have originated from Pali (''suvaṇṇabhūmi'', "land of gold") or Sanskrit श्याम (''śyāma'', "dar ...

. It assigned a numerical rank to each person depending on their status, and served to determine their precedence in society, and especially among the nobility. The numbers represented the number of ''

rai RAI – Radiotelevisione italiana (; commercially styled as Rai since 2000; known until 1954 as Radio Audizioni Italiane) is the national public broadcasting company of Italy, owned by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. RAI operates many ter ...

'' of land a person was entitled to own—''sakdina'' literally translates as "field prestige"—although there is no evidence that it was employed literally. The

Three Seals Law The ''Three Seals Law'' or ''Three Seals Code'' ( th, กฎหมายตราสามดวง; ) is a collection of law texts compiled in 1805 on the orders of King Rama I of Siam. Most of the texts were laws from the Ayutthaya era which ...

, for example, specifies a ''sakdina'' of 100,000 for the '' Maha Uparat'', 10,000 for the Chao Phraya Chakri, 600 for learned Buddhist monks, 20 for commoners and 5 for slaves. The term is also used to refer to the feudal-like social system of the period, where common freemen or ''phrai'' () were subject to conscription or

corvée Corvée () is a form of unpaid, forced labour, that is intermittent in nature lasting for limited periods of time: typically for only a certain number of days' work each year. Statute labour is a corvée imposed by a state for the purposes of ...

labour in service of the kingdom for half of the months of the year, under the control of an overseer or ''munnai'' (). Since 1945, the term "sakdina" has been used frequently as a critique of Thai political authority. In the 1950s, Thai intellectuals like

Jit Phumisak Chit Phumisak (also spelt Jit Poumisak; th, จิตร ภูมิศักดิ์, ; 25 September 1930 – 5 May 1966) was a Thai Marxist historian, activist, author, philology, philologist, poet, songwriter, and communism, communist revol ...

and

Kukrit Pramoj Mom Rajawongse Kukrit Pramoj ( th, คึกฤทธิ์ ปราโมช, , ; 20 April 1911 – 9 October 1995) was a Thai politician, scholar and professor. He was Speaker of the House of Representatives of Thailand 1973–1974. He was t ...

both critiqued the concept in different ways. Jit Phumisak viewed sakdina as a persistent remnant of exploitative class relations in his analysis of what is typically translated as "feudalism." Kukrit Pramoj claimed that sakdina was a fundamentally Thai form of social organization. Kukrit claimed that Thai and European feudalism were fundamentally different in his essay Farang Sakdina. Waters, Tony. M. R. Kukrit Pramoj’s theory of good governance and political change: the dialectics of Farang Sakdina. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9, 156 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01158-9 Demonstrators in large demonstrations in

2020-2021 Thai protests The hyphen-minus is the most commonly used type of hyphen, widely used in digital documents. It is the only character that looks like a minus sign or a dash in many character sets such as ASCII or on most keyboards, so it is also used as such. ...

also criticized the persistence of authoritarian "sakdina" values in the administration of the Thai government.

References

Feudalism in Asia Economy of the Ayutthaya Kingdom {{Thailand-stub