BEING BROWN AND INDIAN IN SINGAPORE

At the receiving end of a micro-aggression at a bus-stop, I began to read about Indians in Singapore.

Raffles Place. Established in the 1820s by Sir Stamford Raffles as Singapore’s main mercantile district, this area became a regional centre for finance and commerce.

Last week, I’d been at the receiving end of what I perceived to be racist behavior. My husband’s response was typical. “I think you’re reading too much into the behavior of two children,” he said, adding that I should dwell, instead, on the positive vibes I’d enjoyed in Singapore.

The incident happened so swiftly that I may have missed it had I been there with a book in hand. I’d been seated on a bench waiting for my bus at a crowded bus-stop called Clementi station. In a while, two young children about 6 and 10 years old—blonde-haired and blue-eyed and most likely siblings—made their way towards my bench. Behind them, a lady, presumably their caretaker, walked up and stood by their side. The little girl scooted over to sit next to me. Seconds later, she seemed to have second thoughts. She got up and whispered something to her brother in a tongue that I did not recognize. One word came through clearly, however. Through the corner of my eye I noticed how she had pushed her older sibling towards me so that he was now adjacent to me and she was farther away. The word “Indian” was now exchanged many times by the two. A few minutes in, the lady issued a warning of some sort to her two wards. Then she and I locked eyes before she looked away.

The incident pushed me to learn more about the history of the vibrant community of Indians in Singapore. Since the island nation was established by the British in 1819, people from the Indian subcontinent have made seminal contributions to its development. Singaporeans of Indian or South Asian ancestry constitute nine percent of the country's citizens, making them the third largest ethnic group in Singapore today.  

When the British colony was set up in Singapore in 1819, 120 Indian soldiers arrived to do the hard work of establishing a trading port. Rajesh Rai, author of Indians in Singapore, describes a bazaar contingent  made up of “domestic servants, chaiwallahas, grooms and dhobis”. Over time, alongside the British,  was a coterie of civil service staff; years later, some of the Englishmen were supplanted by educated Indians who were fluent in the English language.

Most of the ports were penal colonies—Penang, Bencoolen, Andaman islands—and were built by convicts from India. There was a reason for this. In order to underscore the difference in class and establish the racial superiority of master over subordinate, the Empire sought to employ brown folk in public works and agriculture.

Let us not forget that in the 18th century, the British were aghast at its American colony’s pursuit of slave trade and abolished the practice in 1834. Nevertheless, when the Empire needed workers for sugar and rubber plantations, they turned to India’s multitudes, fashioning another kind of slavery—called the system of indentured labor—in locations such as Fiji, Guyana and Mauritius. Rai lays out the “unique characteristics in the disposition of Indian diasporas in port cities” such as Rangoon, Penang, Hong Kong and Singapore because of their “heterogenous socio-economic makeup of immigrant groups”.

The earliest Indians in the mercantile community in Singapore were Muslims; they sailed from India’s Coromandel Coast, the Malabar coast and Gujarat. To make the world of credit easy for local unschooled traders doing business in the port, devout men from the Chettiar community originating from Pudukottai and Sivagangai districts of Tamil Nadu arrived in droves to become merchant bankers. By day, these financiers would be hunched over their low-slung wooden desks, writing into their ledger. By night, they would push aside the furniture and roll out a mattress to sleep. Temple worship was often equated with business success among Chettiars. The first temple in Singapore—Sri Mariamman Temple—was built by businessman Naraina Pillai eight years after he arrived in Singapore with Stamford Raffles in June 1819.

Indians were some of the first Singapore policemen, lording over others even though they themselves had once been incarcerated. For over a hundred years, the colony’s launderers—read about the last of them—thrashed clothes on stones near the mouth of the Singapore river and hung them out to dry on a patch of land that has now morphed into Dhoby Ghaut, a metro stop and mall. As establishments grew around the river, the local character of Singapore became as vibrant and cacophonic as the people who lived there. Indian laborers and cowherds lived in what is now informally called Serangoon (Little India).  

The Dhoby Ghaut metro station was built over what used to be the laundry grounds of old Singapore. Muralist Yip Yew Chong presents his reimagined interpretation of how the area at Dhoby Ghaut might have looked.

As in the past, even in today’s international metropolis of Singapore, I find every stripe of Indian at all social and economic strata. Let’s consider a few I’ve run into in real life—or on television—in the last sixteen weeks. There’s the Tamil Muslim man in a food court in Holland Drive Market & Food Centre who sells what must be a delicious roti-prata although I’m yet to try it. There’s the famous lawyer Mr. K. Shanmugam, a Member of Parliament; born and raised in the country, this well-spoken minister impresses me with his tough stance against sexual offenders that’s worth a listen. There’s the elderly gentleman who works at Jothi Store & Flower Shop in Serangoon who, upon realizing that we were from America, wondered if African Americans were dangerous people. We let him know that they had been vilified as a people for 400 years and that they were no more dangerous than white Americans or, say, the two of us.

There’s a globetrotting friend heading a unit of a multinational who arrived here in the 90s as an expat Indian and opted for citizenship. For the last 30 years, Supriya has divided her time between Singapore, Malaysia and Germany but she swears by her Singapore passport, the most coveted in the world. Then there are trained priests, musicians and cooks in Singapore’s Hindu temples and teachers at arts organizations who are on a temporary work permit for just a few years.

I see many young Indians, too. On the bus or in the metro, I encounter troops of uniform-wearing Indian school children. Last week I wrote about the tailors of Indian origin under the five-foot walkways in the Indian enclave. Then there are countless grocers of Indian ancestry whose shops are frequented by all the locals. I patronize a grocery store at West Coast Community Centre run by two ex-engineers who—audaciously yet respectfully—call me aunty. Indians here seem to dominate the banking and shipping industries.  

There are also at least 250, 000 migrant workers from Tamil Nadu (and Bangladesh) who are here to oversee public works, continuing the tradition of what they did 200 years ago: they’re in construction projects, marine yards, residential complexes, heritage parks, and road improvement. Not to forget the scores of other Indians—predominantly of Tamil ancestry, of course—who are second or third generation Singaporean or Malayan for whom this country is home, not India.

A migrant worker at a renovation project in Singapore. They suffered during the outbreak of Covid-19 in dormitories. An organization called Itsrainingraincoats aims to improve the lives of migrant workers in Singapore, by building bridges to strengthen their integration into our community, city and country. 

I’ve noted how while all types of Indians call Singapore home, there is a fair amount of tsk-tsking by one group of another group, reminding me of the sort of thing I experienced back in the United States. In every country, a pecking order emerges of a group of people within a community and across communities. Human beings often forget that they were once fresh off the boat. They believe the person who arrived first belongs more completely and has assimilated much more than the one who arrived by a subsequent boat. I suppose every human is territorial and cagey until he begins to see another in himself.

It takes work to disabuse people of preconceived notions. I don’t know exactly what transpired that afternoon at the bus stop but it was a telling incident about how much more education had to happen even in a place as multiracially diverse and thoughtful as Singapore.

Having watched the consciousness around the BLM movement in the United States and endured the racist views of a former American president, I’ve been impressed by the sensitivity and care with which Singapore’s leadership, through The Straits Times, thinks about subjects that are tantamount to tinderbox in most nations.

In a recent debate, I saw how the prime minister debated the adoption of a tudung (head scarf) by Muslim nurses; it was in staggering contrast to the impetuousness of the French ban on overt religious signs that incited the Muslim community in France a few years ago. In its pledge to be secular, France does not allow a Tamilian Hindu temple to build a traditional gopuram (tower), for instance. These lively temple towers coexist here in Singapore alongside mosques and churches; likewise, caste marks and traditional clothing across religious lines are common in Singapore’s public spaces.

I’ve noticed that Singapore’s multi-tiered setup does lead to undercurrents and angst; I’ve heard of incidents in which people from the same community disparaged others who were not in their “class” in society. That is another reason why even as the standard of living improves, multi-racial harmony may still be as fragile as an eggshell in a country that has endured  three race riots. As in everything in public life , Singapore’s stance on promoting harmony could not be clearer.

In a salute to secularism, the Singapore government extends its multiracial spirit even in its public housing strategy and I wrote about it recently. Over time, tolerance does lead to empathy. Notwithstanding the government initiatives, the real work still begins inside the home.