Please provide a summary of Amitav Ghosh's "Dancing in Cambodia."

This essay recounts the 1906 journey of King Sisowath of Cambodia, one hundred classical dancers and musicians, and his daughter, Princess Soumphady, to France. The author meets a woman named Chea Samy, who knew the princess and was later Pol Pot's sister-in-law. Pol Pot was the leader of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, and the author tells the story of how Chea Samy was forced to leave the city of Phnom Penh during the time the Khmer Rouge...

This essay recounts the 1906 journey of King Sisowath of Cambodia, one hundred classical dancers and musicians, and his daughter, Princess Soumphady, to France. The author meets a woman named Chea Samy, who knew the princess and was later Pol Pot's sister-in-law. Pol Pot was the leader of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, and the author tells the story of how Chea Samy was forced to leave the city of Phnom Penh during the time the Khmer Rouge were in power and work on a rice farm. She only realized later that her brother-in-law, Pol Pot, had taken over the country in a brutal totalitarian regime. After the famine and hardship of the Khmer Rouge era, Chea Samy and her husband found their way back to the city, where she tried to gather together the disbanded classical dancers who she used to know. In 1981, these classical dancers performed for the first time since the Khmer Rouge had come to power.

The author then connects King Sisowath's journey to France, where he became enamored of French culture, with Pol Pot's later journey to France in the late 1940s and early 1950s. When King Sisowath traveled to France in 1906, he went with his Palace Minister, Thiounn (pronounced Chunn), who earned great renown in France in part because he spoke French. Thiounn's son went on to attend university in France, as did Thiounn's grandson, Thiounn Mumm, who became a mentor to Pol Pot, then known as Saloth Sar. It was likely Thiounn Mumm who introduced Pol Pot to the French communist party in the 1950s.

The author makes the connection between King Sisowath's love of French culture and Pol Pot's adoption of communism in France. Both men came to love the culture of the colonizer, and they both brought back European-influenced ideologies to Cambodia that would have disastrous effects. The king established a French-style lycée that went on to educate men who joined the Khmer Rouge, and Pol Pot adopted a communist ideology that would bring brutality to Cambodia. Both men were examples of what the author calls "the power of Cambodia's involvement in the culture and politics of modernism, in all its promise and horror."