Tum Teav

Tum Teav (ទុំទាវ) is a Cambodian tragic love story of a novice monk named Tum and a young girl named Teav, often called the Cambodian Romeo and Juliet. It has been told in oral, literary, theater and film versions, and Cambodian schools have taught it since 1957.

Illustration, as an impression, of a palm-leaf manuscript bundle on a low wooden stand beside woven bamboo rice containers, with a rice field and a forested hill behind.

Book details
Khmer title	ទុំទាវ
Author	Botumthera Som (1915 version)
Original language	Khmer

On this page

1. The story
2. Origins
3. Literary versions
4. In schools
5. Translations
6. On stage and screen
7. See also
8. References

On this page

1. The story
2. Origins
3. Literary versions
4. In schools
5. Translations
6. On stage and screen
7. See also
8. References

The story

The story is set in Tbong Khmom district. Tum is a novice monk with a fine singing voice who falls in love with Teav. Her mother has promised her to Moeurn Nguon, whose father Orh-Chhuon is the governor of Tbong Khmom, but royal servants take Teav to the palace for the king. When Tum tells the king that Teav is his fiancée, the king gives her to him in marriage. In the literary version, Teav's mother then calls her home with a letter falsely claiming she is very ill, and the governor prepares the wedding to his son. Orh-Chhuon's defiance of the king's order turns the story to tragedy for both lovers, and the king punishes the governor, his family and everyone who took part in the plot.

Santhor Mok's version reads the lovers' fate as the working of karma: Tum left the monkhood against his abbot's advice, and Teav refused the husband chosen for her, against custom.

Origins

Traveling singers performed Tum Teav in the Cambodian countryside during the 19th century. In the late 1800s a woman named Sai Pour recited it to the chapei, a long-necked lute with two strings, in Sithor Kandal in Prey Veng province and elsewhere. George Chigas takes its place in the minstrels' repertoire as a sign that the story mattered to Cambodians by the middle of the 19th century at the latest. The oral versions differ from the literary ones in a few points. The monk is called Ek rather than Tum, the lovers are engaged before Teav goes to the palace, and it is the governor and his son, not Teav's mother, who think up the false letter.

The French explorer Louis Delaporte heard the story in 1873 in the village of Beng Mealea, during the entertainment that followed a Buddhist Kathin ceremony. His book Voyage au Cambodge, published in Paris in 1880, describes a singer telling the love story of Ek and "the beautiful Théau", and prints a French translation by Étienne Aymonier. Aymonier went to Tbong Khmom in 1883 to look into the story's origins, and his second translation appeared in Le Cambodge in 1900.

Many Cambodians regard the story as true. It appears in two versions of the Royal Chronicles; one of them, known as P57, places it in 1654, near the end of the reign of King Rea-mea, whose capital was at Oudong. Chigas notes that firm evidence for the people and events is hard to find.

Literary versions

The Venerable Botumthera Som, also called Padumatthera Som, was born in 1852 in Kamprau village in Prey Veng province, on the edge of the old Tbong Khmom district. He was abbot of Wat Kamprau when he finished his palm-leaf manuscript of Tum Teav in September 1915, at 63. The poem has 1,050 stanzas of four lines, each line of seven syllables. The Buddhist Institute published it in 1962 from a 1935 copy, and this edition became the school text.

A second literary version came out in 1960 from the Kim-Ky publishing house in Phnom Penh. Four teachers at Lycée Sisowath built it from four incomplete palm-leaf manuscripts, with passages from the oral versions and the ending of Som's version. Because the manuscripts lacked the pages naming an author, the book was credited to the court poet Santhor Mok, born in 1846 in Oudong, who served as royal secretary to King Norodom. Some writers held Mok to be the true author and Som's poem an imitation; others argued that Som drew on Sai Pour's oral telling. The authorship has been debated since the 1960s.

In schools

Khmer literature entered the national curriculum in 1957, after independence from France, and Tum Teav was part of it from the start. In 1958 the government made it a set text in schools and universities from the secondary level, and by the 1960s it was central to the Khmer literature course in secondary schools. When the curriculum was cut back in 1965, Tum Teav stayed. In 1960 the Khmer Writers Association traveled to Tbong Khmom to look for the story's roots in history.

Translations

Aymonier's French translations of the oral versions came first, in 1880 and 1900. George Chigas spent more than four years on an English translation of Som's version, published with a study of the poem in 2005 by the Documentation Center of Cambodia. Chigas took up the story as a graduate student, after his Khmer literature teacher told him that to understand Cambodian culture he had to read Tum Teav.

On stage and screen

In the 1960s the actor Chhorn Tort (ឈន ទត) turned the story into a new kind of yike, the Khmer musical theater. The play toured in Cambodia and other Asian countries, and the choreographer Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, who saw it in her childhood in the early 1970s, called it "the first modern yike". After the Khmer Rouge years he took the name Pech Tum Kravel (ពេជ្រ ទុំក្រវិល), in honor of the lovers of Tum Teav. The Angkor Database instead says he became famous under that stage name in the 1960s, after acting in films of Tum Teav. In the early 1980s he and Chheng Phon staged a new yike Tum Teav for the National Department of Arts, with two comic narrators who talk to each other and to the audience between scenes. In 2000 the Phnom Penh label Rasmey Hang Meas released The Love of Tum Teav, a compact disc of 14 songs on Kravel's lyrics for that production.

ASEF counts four films of the story made between 1960 and 1975. Chigas names two of them, a 1966 film by the Association of Khmer Filmmakers and a loose 1972 adaptation by Indra Devi Film, directed by Biv Chhay Leang, and lists a later film of 2003 whose cover names SSB Productions. Kravel also acted in a Tum Teav film. In 1988 the state publisher Youveavey issued a comic-strip Tum Teav drawn by Ut Roeun, with a preface presenting the lovers as early fighters against the abuse of power by a feudal ruling class.

In February 2021 the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts summoned the owners of a Facebook page and the actors of an online video called Tum Teav 2021, after many people criticized it. The video showed two actors dressed as monks flirting with women, and critics said it harmed national religion, literature and culture. The two women behind the page posted a video apology.

See also

• O! Maha Mount Dangrek

References 8