Indic-Siamese Bitexts and Ayutthaya Scribal Culture: Exposition and Exegesis in Three Kham Luang Manuscripts

This article studies paratextual scribal features from the oldest leporello manuscripts of three Thai Buddhist poems composed for and by the royal court of Ayutthaya: the Pali-Siamese Nanthopananthasut kham luang and Mahachat kham luang along with the Sanskrit-Siamese Supritithammarachachadok kham luang . The manuscripts date from the early eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries and are each composed in a special bilingual format known as the Indic-vernacular bitext. Two kinds of compositional modes govern these works: exposition , where phrases in Indic are followed by their rendering in Siamese, and exegesis , where a distinct unit of Indic, often a stanza of verse, is cited in full before being subject to a complex form of analysis. The scribal features we focus on—color, script, spacing, and punctuation, along with markers for verse citation, section division, and musical notation—form a unique constellation among all known bitextual manuscripts in Southeast Asia. We argue that these scribal features are crafted to accentuate the differences not only between Indic and vernacular passages but also those between exposition and exegesis, thereby revealing the inner workings of each composition.