Multiculturalism in Colonial Singapore: A Study of Plurality and Solidarity

By Phyllis Ghim-Lian Chew

Multiculturalism

The image of Singapore¹ that emerges from the first six chapters of Sejarah Melayu is that of a great city where large numbers of foreigners gathered (Brown, 1976). Traveller George Morris (1878, p. 17) recounted that the Singapore harbour was “thronged with junks, topes and prows that used to arrive in larger numbers from China, Cochin China, Celebes, Java, Bawean and other places in the archipelago”. Another traveller, E. F. Howell, wrote about life along a typical Singapore street: Indian women making curry paste, Chinese women selling flowers that were bought by Malay housewives, Chinese letter-writers, Indian coffee vendors whose customers included Malays and Chinese (1928, pp. 4–5). Joan Marbeck (2004, p. 33) remembered “smell specification” – not just of streets, but also of houses: the Malay house would smell of fresh coconut, fried fish and the house cat; the Chinese of joss sticks, garlic and soya paste; the Indian of alba, curry powder, ghee, yoghurt and Indian incense; and the Kristang of lemongrass, onions, garlic, coriander and pepper. Certainly, then, Singapore had always conjured up an image of multiculturalism.

Instead of celebrating this multiculturalism that has contributed to the dynamic well-being and socioreligious vibrancy of Singapore, there has instead been a tendency to highlight the inherent potential of colour, race, religion and languages for their divisiveness and disruption. Turnbull (1996, p. 131) described Singapore in the 1920s as “the Chicago of the east … a haven of gun and street gangs, who carried out a reign of terror in Chinatown and rural districts”. Maideen (2000) recounted how Malay and Indian Muslims took to the streets and attacked Europeans and Eurasians indiscriminately during the Maria Hertogh riots of 1950.Accounts of the racial-religious riots of 1964 and 1965 appear as a staple in sociological studies on multiculturalism (cf. Kong & Tong, 2003; Lai, 2006; Aljunied, 2009). For example, Pereira (2003) depicted Singapore as a place of “triads and riots”, secret societies – ethnic and dialectal in origin – identified by numbers and symbols. Holmberg (2010) highlighted the multiracial nature of the underclass by recounting a Yuletide tragedy in 1872. Such studies tend to contribute to a view of multiculturalism as more of a liability rather than an asset.

Indeed, the inclination to view colonial society from a racially scripted viewpoint has impeded us from highlighting the fact that many local-born Chinese had, in their own ways, celebrated the gift of multiculturalism in their adopted homeland of their parents; for example, Tan Tock Seng (Song, 1984, 1923), who built the first hospital in 1949, subjected it to the clause that it would be for all races in Singapore.

The Plural Society

According to Turnbull, “the natural divisions in Singapore’s mixed population were so deep that the authorities had no need to employ any conscious ‘divide and rule’ policy” (1989, p. 55). The sociologist Émile Durkheim viewed such a society to be inherently unstable due to the lack of a common will – and so, order had to be imposed by the colonial regime. Order is necessary to prevent societal disintegration in the absence of a shared set of values and systems. Indeed, many studies such as Leon and Leon (1977) and Hefner (2001) have been influenced by Furnivall’s concept of the “plural” society:

In Burma, as in Java, probably the first thing that strikes a visitor is the medley of
people – Europeans, Chinese, Indian and native. It is in the strictest sense a medley,
for they mix, but do not combine. Each group holds by its own religion, its own
culture and language, its own ideas and ways. As individuals, they meet but only
in the market-place, in buying and selling. There is a plural society, with different
sections of the community living side by side, but separately, within the same
political unit. Even in the economic sphere there is a division of labour along racial
lines. Natives, Chinese, Indians and Europeans all have different functions, and within
each major group, subsections have particular occupations. (Furnivall 1956, p. 304)²

At first glance, the spatial-racial concentration of population in colonial Singapore bears testimony to this plurality. There were the British and other Caucasians in Tanglin, the Malays in Kampong Glam, the Arabs in Arab Street, the Chinese in Chinatown and the Indians in Little India. Each ethnic area sold goods peculiar to its customers; for example, Arab Street and Chinatown had their own unique restaurants, shops and ethnic items of purchase.³ Colonial institutional barriers to employment, such as the colour bar (discrimination against people who are not white-skinned), also contributed to trade specialisation among the races. The Malays, for example, were fisherman and padi-growers, the South Indians were in road construction, and the vast majority of Chinese were in trade and common labour. Even within the Chinese, there was further specialisation among dialect groups. While labourers were from all dialect groups, Hokkiens were well known as merchants, Teochews as agriculturists, and Cantonese and Hakkas as skilled artisans. Division of labour was natural because new arrivals from the same district in China veered towards occupations in which they could find similar support groups (Lim, 2002).

The institutions of religion and education also played their respective roles in accentuating rather than dissipating differences. For example, Chinese Catholics were delineated into various dialectal communities and given their own congregational space to erect their communal social institutions by the Catholic Mission (Liew, 2008). Racial stereotypes were repeated in educational discourse as evident in textbooks used by schools.⁴ While the British sponsored English education for a small elite, they allowed each race to form its own ethnic schools using its own language medium and foreign imported syllabus (Koh, 2007). It was only in 1947, with the imminent prospect of self-government, that first attempts were made to enable schools to be organised on a regional rather than a racial basis (Gopinathan, 1974).

Intermarriages were frowned upon by the colonials and imitated by the colonialised.⁵ Remnants of this racist legacy remain through the existence of derogatory labels such as “negro blood”, “half-blooded Indian” or “mixed blood”. Politician-turned-diplomat Joe Conceicao (2007) reported that when Indian-Chinese marriages were nicknamed “kopi susu” (“coffee with milk”). Another Singapore diplomat Maurice Baker (1995, p. 55), offspring of an English father and an Indian mother, recounted in his autobiography that, without provocation, in his youth he had been called “father horse, mother donkey”.⁶ Doubtless, such attitudes found a significant number of hybrid offspring to be socially maladjusted and suffering from psychological problems (as their mixed heritage was neither prestigious nor socially acceptable to the British).⁷

While it may be more noteworthy to focus on separateness and antagonism rather than cooperation and solidarity between the rulers and the ruled or among the diverse ruled, this article draws from the social and linguistic history of colonial Singapore in an attempt to examine the extent to which there may have been a fair bit of trans-ethnic solidarities. I propose a solidarity-plurality model, which is in reality a cline with parameters such as dress, food, art forms, religious and literary activities as well as familial practices such as rites of passage, so as to study the processes of acculturation and assimilation. Such a continuum is useful, for it shows a gradual transition. In our effort to understand colonial Singapore, concepts such as indigenisation or localisation may be more suitably employed rather than transplantation, because it suggests accommodation-assimilation, which is, more often than not, the norm. In contrast to a cultural accommodation-assimilation, the notion of transplantation suggests the transference of culture en masse from the original socio-cultural milieu and rebuilding it in other lands – a concept closer to the plural society of J. S. Furnivall.⁸

The Plurality-Solidarity Cline

The continuum begins with plurality at one end and solidarity at the other end. While plurality conjures up images of dissension and divisiveness, solidarity connotes qualities such as cooperation and peaceful exchanges. The cline measures the degree of acculturation, the exchange of cultural features that results when groups of individuals from different cultures come into continuous firsthand contact. It is a process that sees the alteration of the cultural patterns and speech of diverse groups through their association with one another.⁹ The extent of the alteration will depend on the length and intensity of the contact as well as the socio-political variables inherent in the context of the encounter.

Acculturation proceeds in tandem with assimilation. Both are degrees of the process of integration. While acculturation sees both groups remaining distinct, assimilation is a condition whereby the distinction begins to blur (Kottak, 2005, pp. 209, 423). In other words, logically, acculturation will lead to assimilation, usually in favour of the majority culture. This means that the minority – defined here not just in terms of numbers but also of political, socio-economic power – will lose their traditional culture and possibly their original language. To illustrate, we may place first-generation Chinese rickshaw coolie (labourer) (Warren, 1986) at one end of the cline, and the second- or third-generation migrant at the further end. Where the coolie is concerned, he speaks only his mother tongue, eats only the cheapest of meals and wears his ethnic (Chinese) clothes. Somewhere along the middle of the cline is the second or third generation migrant, probably speaking their nativised version of Malay, eating meals that contain local ingredients such as tamarind and lemongrass and wearing a Malayan dress.

Examples of non-labourer migrants in Singapore include Arabs, Jawi Peranakans and Baba Chinese, all of whom may be said to have assimilated to a greater degree when their socio-cultural norms and linguistic habits are taken into account (Clammer, 1980). For example, the Baba Malay, linguistically classified as a variety of Malay (Pakir, 1986), has discarded Malay prefixes and suffixes, in line with the uninflected original Hokkien syntax. Words of Hokkien phonemes are pronounced (without tones, of course) with Malay phonemes. Code mixing of Hokkien and Malay is apparent everywhere, such as the use of the Hokkien derived gua and lu for the first-person pronoun “I” and “you”, mixed with the third-person pronoun dia from Malay.

Such a view of the populace has already been observed, but not singled out for close analysis. In the 1880s, when Din (1885, p. 26) noted spectators at a Chinese wayang (theatrical performance), he observed that it was “composed of all classes of Chinese from the rich Baba to the poor coolie”.10 Vaughan (1879, 1971) notices distinctions between Hokkien- and Teochew-speaking Babas in the 1850s, and that the former viewed themselves as “purer” since they arrived earlier in the colony. However, in the 1870s, Vaughan (1879, 1971) wrote that the distinction between “Straits-born” and China-born” was no longer as meaningful as they had been a generation earlier, because he found that many of the differences that he observed previously had been “ironed out” with the passage of time.

The Three-Generational Model

Following these initial observations, I have devised a three-generational model through which we may better understand multiculturalism in colonial Singapore¹¹:

Diagram 1: The three-generational model: the acculturation-assimilation cline

plurality _________________________________ solidarity

(Generation 1 – migrant)                                          (Generation 2)

I assume that both new arrivals and their descendants follow a “straight line” or a convergence to the “native” culture, which is to say that the two entities become more similar in norms, values, behaviour and characteristics over time. It also expects those residing the longest in the host population, as well as members of later generations, to show greater similarities with the majority group than those who have spent less time in the host society. With each generation, the local or contextual culture becomes more and more entrenched.

Where language is concerned, the first generation is likely to make some progress in language assimilation but would remain dominant in his native tongue. The second generation is usually bilingual, and the third generation is likely to speak only the language of the majority – which, in our time frame, are the lingua francas English and Bazaar Malay (Chew, 2009). One’s lexical pool may also betray where one is on the cline. For example, Shellabear (1913) observed that when a Chinese calls his father n-tia rather than papa (Malay bapa is quite different from the Hokkien equivalent, lau-pe), he is probably of an earlier generation. In the Indian community, it has been said that what differentiates a newcomer from a later generation is the extent of the use of belacan (shrimp paste mixed with pounded chilli paste), the belimbing (a tiny acidic fruit) and chilli pedas (tiny hot chillies) (Shellabear, 1913).

Rather than assimilation or acculturation, the newcomer is faced, more specifically, with transculturation, a difficult process because of a lack of precedent. The speed of transculturation varies, depending not just on the motivation of the immigrant but also on social and political variables at the time. For example, when a penniless migrant arrives in colonial Singapore, he naturally seeks out common associates who speak his language and who can help him understand the strange culture he sees around him. He is likely to stay in a racial enclave and engage in racially bounded occupations. He may be tempted to join clans or secret societies that can help him alleviate the state of anomie that he is likely to experience, since these societies attempt to reproduce the practices, norms and values with which he is familiar. In this sense, the plurality of the colonial society is accentuated. However, there comes a time when the migrant, having paid off his bond, is likely to move out of his enclave to a new area, perhaps because he wishes to marry or to begin a business of his own. Now operating on his own rather than as a bonded worker, the migrant learns the languages around him – most likely Bazaar Malay, which is used by different races, and Hokkien, the dominant Chinese dialect. Later, when he catches up with the native-born in terms of their educational attainment, occupation and income, there will be – naturally – less distinct residential concentration.

While many new arrivals express a wish to return to their country of origin, the majority of migrants stay on (Tregonning, 1964, 1972) – one reason being that many would-be returnees realise that, on their return, they would likely be “foreigners” in several senses of the word in the land of their forefathers. Many who stay, marry. Their offspring are interesting for our study, for they are likely to learn from one or more traditions from birth, but inevitably with each generation, the dominant culture becomes more and more dominantly accultured for their descendants. Here, the role of the woman, often the primary caregiver of the next generation, cannot be discounted. If, for example, the singkeh (new arrival) marries a second- or third-generation local woman, their children will acculturalise to the local context speedily.¹² If he marries a girl who is also a migrant, the acculturalisation process is, of course, slower. Last but not least, if he sends for a woman from China, the acculturation process will be temporarily impeded, since the woman will tend to reproduce the culture from her village rather than the local culture.¹³

Sometimes, the woman is from another ethnicity, in which case assimilation to the local context is often accelerated. According to Reid (1993), some of the maritime and commercial peoples recognised by the Portuguese by labels such as Jawa, Malay, Luzon and Jawi are likely to have intermarried with Chinese trader-settlers. Intermarriage is often an active agent of social integration and indicative of intimate and profound relations between different groups. For example, in his study of small creolised communities of Chinese origin in Banka and the Straits Settlements, Skinner (1996, p. 51) shows how the offspring between migrants and indigenous women were easily and quickly absorbed into the immediate community. Vaughan described Penang in the 1950s as comprising “half-caste Chinese, having Malay mothers”, the extent of their acculturation discerned superficially through “the amount of chillies, assam and belachan that was in their food” (1879, pp. 6, 28). Such offspring have the luxury to choose, for example, either the competitive striving work ethic of the Chinese or a more relaxed, possibly agrarian, native lifestyle by marrying once again uxorilocally into an indigenous family. A more common intermarriage is that between an Arab and a Malay woman. Here the similarity of religious belief (Islam) and the role of the mother as the first educator of the child enable quicker acculturalisation (Karim, 2009).

Assimilation is less likely to be a zero-sum game in which the culture of the less powerful is replaced completely by that of the more powerful;¹⁴ rather, it is more likely to be a two-way process of bicultural blending. The two groups meet; they exchange not just goods but also intangibles such as ideas and belief systems. As a case in point, in the 19th century, the Malay language can be seen to be moving to assimilate rather than to resist Hokkien, a symbolic act of welcome and hospitality. For example, the Malay days of the week were adapted to follow the Hokkien equivalents – pai it, pai zi, pai za, etc (“weekday” followed by “one”, “two”, “three” and so on 1, 2, 3) – in oral communication. The use of hari satu (Monday; “day one”), hari dua (Tuesday; “day two”), hari tiga (Wednesday; day “three”) in oral communication can be seen as moving away from the more Islamic-influenced hari isnin, hari selasa and hari rabu. Malay has also unselfconsciously absorbed much of Hokkien’s lexis, such as the words beca (trishaw), bihun (vermicelli), cat (paint), cincai (anyhow), gua (I/me), guli (marbles), kentang (potato), kamcent (sprout), tahu (bean curd) and tauke (boss). On the other hand, the Hokkiens have also adopted many Malay words into their vocabulary, such as agak (guess), botak (bald), champur (mix), gadoh (fight), jamban (toilet), kachau (disturb), longkang (drain), roti (bread) and torlong (help).

A Bicultural Alternation

Movement along the cline is not necessarily unidirectional, but can also be bi- and multi-directional. For example, as a form of guanxi (connections), the Chinese may want to acculturalise not just to the Malays, but also to the British. By the end of the 19th century, it had become increasingly apparent that the social status of the Chinese was determined not just by their appropriation of Malay sociol-cultural norms and their proficiency in the lingua franca but also by their level of assimilation with English values, language and culture in colonial Singapore. For example, the first modern school founded by later-generation Chinese for the education of girls taught in both English and Romanised Malay (Song, 1923). The attire of the Babas also depicted this bi/multicultural aspect: the koon (skirt) and sah (blouse) of Chinese origin, the Western coat and tie, as well as the baju kurong (traditional Malay dress) and batik of indigenous origin (Skinner, 1996, p. 78). We therefore see an acculturalisation process not merely directed at the native people (Malays) but also at other influential groups such as the British in colonial Singapore. For example, Lim Boon Keng suggested that the Chinese discarded the skull cap as “there was nothing artistic about it”, adopted a collared shirt and did away with Chinese shoes, which were “not comfortable for long journey and not waterproof” (1899, p. 58).

Entrepreneur Wong Ah Fook, a migrant who came to Singapore in 1854 at age 17, ensured that his children spoke not just Malay but were educated in both Chinese and Western schools (Lim, 2002). In 1889, Chinese entrepreneur Oei Tiong Ham successfully petitioned the Dutch authorities for permission to wear Western attire in public (Rush, 1990, pp. 248–252). This multicultural orientation of the later generations can also be seen in their lexicon at the turn of the 20th century, which, according to Shellabear (1913), was two-thirds Malay, one-fifth Hokkien and the remainder being Dutch, Portuguese, English, Tamil and an assortment of Indonesian languages.

Movement along the cline is not just forward, but also backwards, and this retreat may be temporary or permanent. When migratory laws were relaxed for women, intermarriages were no longer as common and the pace of assimilation slowed (Freedman, 1962). There were also other reasons. In Thailand and Cambodia, where further reaches on the cline were observed, not least because the Thai and Cambodian rulers enjoyed undiminished prestige, the political structures and stratification systems of the traditional agrarian culture in both countries were kept relatively intact. In contrast, in Java, the Philippines and Malaya, the indigenous status was relatively depressed by the absence of indigenes whose power and status were unequivocally superior. In Singapore, colonial law was developed in such a way that only the Malays were identified with Islamic family law and not the other races. Accordingly, Straits law unambiguously considered Babas to be Chinese, hence encouraging them to tacitly view Chinese religion as essential to their identity and to resist conversion to Islam. Hence, unlike the Chinese mestizo in the Philippines who converted to Catholicism and became fully Filipinised and the Chinese Peranakans of Java who converted to Islam, the Babas of Singapore clung to the Chinese religion and, in so doing, were eventually re-absorbed into Chinese society. Last but not least, acculturation was halted significantly because of the rise of Chinese nationalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and with it the setting up of Chinese-language schools and newspapers to perpetuate Chinese culture in Singapore. Together, these schools and newspapers established the basis of a self-perpetuating Chinese community (cf. Skinner, 1996). On the linguistic scene, by the early 20th century, this truncation was symbolised by Hokkien replacing Baba creole as the business language of the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States (Shellabear, 1913; Skinner, 1996, p. 88)

Movers on the cline may also exhibit temporary “acculturative stress”. In addition, we may find distinct groups such as the Chetty Indians practising certain Malay customs that the Malays themselves had already abandoned. Thiyagaraj, for example, observed that the Melaka Chetties “are also more Hindu than the Hindus in their meticulous observance of Hindu rites” (1998, p. 71).

The rest of this article argues that, rather than assuming that distinct ethnic communities were homogeneous by themselves and did not mix except in the marketplace, it might be more accurate to use the device of a cline for a more sophisticated understanding not just of race relations but of racial identities in colonial Singapore. The extent of this polarity or solidarity of the races can be observed in cooperative behaviour, evident in both public and private domains as well as in variables such as fusion food, recipes, music, dances and clothing.

Public and Private Cooperation

It is not unusual to find different races working closely – often harmoniously – together to achieve a common goal in both public and private areas. Race was irrelevant if a mutual gain was imminent and if a lingua franca such as Malay had already effectively bridged the gap. As early as 1852, Keppell (1852) noted that the Malays and Chinese hunted tigers together as a group in the jungle, taking advantage of each others’ strengths and specialisations. Arseculeratne reminded us that many Chinese were known to prefer Sinhalese jewellers to their own kind because of fine workmanship produced by the Sinhalese (1992, p. 25). When Ceylonese lawyer De Silva (1940) wrote a historical romance of Portuguese Malacca, he engaged his “best friend” Yan Kee Leong, of Chinese origin, to do the illustrations in his book.¹⁵ In rites of passage, such as births, it did not matter whom one consulted as long as the goal was accomplished. For example, both the Indian and Chinese communities were not averse to using the services of the Malay bomoh (witch doctor) and the Malay bidan (midwife) (Baker, 1995).¹⁶ According to Abisheganaden, in 20th century colonial Singapore, Sikh bandsmen were hired to provide music at funerals (2005, p. 11). The Chinese were “more than happy to get their money’s worth”, as the loud brassy tunes of the Sikh contingent complemented, in their opinion, the wailing of the professional mourners (Abisheganaden, 2005, p. 11).¹⁷ At the Bukit Brown Cemetery, one may still make out some ornate Chinese graves guarded by porcelain figures of Sikh guards.¹⁸

Malay journalist Zubaidah Ibrahim (2010) recalled her father’s multicultural associates in colonial Singapore:

As a legal clerk, he had Chinese friends – both rich and poor. They walk into our lives
because they could hardly speak English and they needed my father’s help to write
letters and other documents for various legal and official purposes – they avoid
Shenton Way prices. My father would type away on his Olivetti while the Chinese
men hung around drinking black coffee. Most conversed in bazaar Malay but a few
could speak only dialect and so they had relatives or friends in tow as translators.

Lim Yew Hock (1986), Chief Minister of Singapore from 1956 to 1959, recounted that on the death of his father in 1931, how he, as the eldest son, had to officiate at the funeral and that he was deeply touched when he saw that his father’s friends, who were from all ethnicities (Chinese, European, Eurasians, Malay and Indians) unabashedly shed tears when paying their last respects. Wong Ah Fook, who enjoyed a good relationship with Sultan Abu Bakar, was able to help the latter develop Johor Bahru; and, in so doing, rose quickly from being a penniless labourer to towkay, banker and chief agriculturalist of pepper, gambier and rubber (Lim, 2002). Such stories underscore the fact that the elites (the British, the Malay rulers and the rich Chinese merchants) in colonial Singapore had a shared social and symbolic world and that they were, in reality, protagonists and partners rather than masters-subjects or confrontational opponents (Holmberg, 2009).

Second-generation politician-turned-diplomat Lee Khoon Choy (1988, p. 6), whose once-penniless father from China married a Chinese native-born woman, recalled how, as a youth, he joined a multiracial (Chinese, Malay, Indian) musical group (or “boria”) that moved from home to home in their community singing both English and Malay songs while playing their guitars and fiddles. His autobiography is a good example of how a second generation has acquired a fondness for wayang bangsawan (Malay opera), the use of Malay music such as keroncong¹⁹ and the adaptation for use in Chinese festivals such as Cap Goh Meh (15th day of the Lunar New Year). This is not uncommon bearing in mind that a century earlier, Vaughn (1971, 1879) observed that “the local-born Chinese” were fond of pantun (Malay poems)²⁰ and lagu (Malay tunes) and performed them with fiddles and tom-toms to entertain guests. By then, Dondang Sayang –a popular hybrid musical form that demanded creativity and on-the-spot improvisation from the singers as they challenged one another in their spontaneous composition and recitation of verses in Malay – was already in existence. It was not just the Chinese who were attracted to Malay music, but also the Indians. Another Singapore diplomat Maurice Baker (2005, p. 9) recounted in his autobiography how his Indian mother used to love to attend bangsawan performances in the evenings when a Malay drama group happened to be in town.

Othman Wok, a former cabinet minister of Singapore (1963 – 77), when asked to comment on race relations, recounted his childhood as one that was intrinsically “multicultural”:

The first four years of my life, I grew up in a Malay-dominated quarters area, with
long barracks with attap roofs. It was my uncle’s quarters actually, where my
grandparents and my parents lived too, and we had to sleep all over the floor.

Next door to our kampung were Chinese farms, vegetables and pigs. They knew that
pigs were taboo to us Malays, so they kept them in fenced compounds, and there
was never any trouble. We kept goats. Our Indian neighbours nearby kept cattle.
People lived peacefully next to each other.

As a little boy, I played with all the Chinese and Indian kids. We communicated in
Bahasa Malay. One day my father brought back a three-wheeled bicycle. I remember
we all climbed on top of it and rode it around.

And it was like that as I grew up and moved to different quarters when my father, a
Malay teacher, was moved around. Malays, Chinese, Indians, we all went to different
schools, but the rest of the day we played together on the football fields.²¹

Singaporean musician Alex Abisheganaden (2005) recalled that music-making in the years prior to World War II usually comprised a multicultural gathering of instrumentalists with mandolins, violins, banjos, ukuleles and drums, playing the popular tunes of the day in three languages – Chinese, English and Malay. Multiracial groups of musicians – Indians, Chinese, Eurasians –would, for instance, offer their services freeof- charge for the sheer fun of performing on a float during the Chingay (Lunar New Year parade) festival, as it went along its selected routes.

Leading a more stable and comfortable existence than their forebears, the later generations possessed free time for literary initiatives as well. For example, they began their own newspapers such as Bintang Timor (Eastern Star) in 1894, which featured not only Chinese works but also, interestingly, Malay poetic forms such as the pantun and syair. Their assimilation was multidirectional, as the newspaper also carried biblical and Christian works, materials obviously influenced by the British masters. This multidirectionality along the assimilative cline is also seen in the commencement of a second newspaper by later-generational Chinese in 1910 entitled Malaysian Advocate, which was confidently published in Malay (Jawi) rather than Chinese or English,²² thus showing the extent of their solidarity and affiliation with the Malayan community.²³

The later-generational Chinese also published Cherita dulukala (“Tales of long ago”) books – Romanised Baba Malay translations of Chinese classics – between 1897 and 1907. Another multidirectional venture, this time in English, The Straits Chinese Magazine flourished from 1897 to 1907, drawing its inspiration from Chinese, English and Malay genres.²⁴ Not to be outdone, another group of native-born Chinese,

ostensibly influenced by the rise of nationalism in China, started the Chinese-medium press, Lat Pau, (Straits Newspaper) and, in this sense, might be said to have impeded the then unquestioning assimilation towards Malay. The emergence of this pro-China lobby points to the fact that the Chinese populace, even among the later-generational offspring, was far from homogeneous. Diversity in colonial Singapore was therefore not merely inter-cultural but also intracultural. In this sense, Furnivall’s (1956) famous mosaic of “European, Chinese, Indians and others” should not just assume cross-cultural differences but also intracultural ones.

Creative stories by one “Sianu” shows that friendly everyday interactions were the norm rather than the exception and that they did not take place only in the marketplace (1938, p. 73–90). In one typical story, entitled “The Best Laid Scheme”, Mrs Cheong Ah Seng, the wife of a Chinese merchant, sits in a veranda of a small house along the main street. There, as the multiracial, multicultural people pass by, they would exchange a neighbourly hello or, as the author puts it, “pause to chaff”. The following excerpt is one such “chaff” between a Malay passerby and Mrs Cheong:

One evening she sat idly watching the passers-by. Daud, son of the Malay schoolmaster, came along:

“Ho, Ma! For whom dost thou wait?” he asked.
“Cheeky one,” answered Mrs Cheong Ah Seng. “For whom shall I wait but for my man?”
“Ha,” chuckled the Malay, “and perchance he’ll be late.”
“Maybe – he hath been late many nights – he hath work to do.”
“Work,” echoed the boy, smiling wickedly. “Such work is not wearying.”
“Why say that?” asked Mrs Cheong Ah Seng sharply.
“For no reason,” replied the Malay.

This piece of dialogue captures an everyday scene of casual intermingling between multiracial neighbours. Mrs Cheong is older and Chinese; Daud is younger and Malay – and this takes place in the evening hour, along the main thoroughfare of a town. It is unfortunate that the author did not represent the dialogue in Malay, as that in actuality would be the language of use. Instead, the author, who is anonymous, envisioning his readership to be English-speaking, put the exchange in English to capture the “friendly chatter” typical of neighbours in a town.

In another telling tale by the same author, entitled “Si Chantek: Miss Beautiful”, a beautiful pre-teen Malay girl is forced by her family to marry a much older man whom she dislikes. Strong-willed, she defies adat (custom) and flees from the arranged marriage to the home of a nearby immigrant Chinese bachelor who has set up shop along the roadside and with whom she has previously struck up a casual acquaintance. He takes pity on her plight and offers her shelter in his humble abode. She knows that if she accepts his help, her reputation will be ruined even though the relationship is not at all sexually motivated. Indeed, as she accepts his help of shelter, he becomes her business mentor, teaching her how to make a living. However Chantek’s father and relatives are furious with this development and plots to kill the Chinese (not because of his ethnicity, but because he has dared to shelter his fugitive and defiant daughter), a mission that they later succeed in effecting. However, despite her protector’s death, a still defiant Chantek refuses to return home but instead takes over his small business. In a few years, she has enlarged it and becomes a rich lady. The story concludes when, at the age of 20, she becomes wealthy enough to attract the hand in marriage of the penghulu’s (village headman) son.
“Silly boy,” said Mrs Cheong Ah Seng. “Be gone, scamp.”
And the Malay ran laughing down the street. (Sianu, 1938, p. 76)

Socio-Cultural Blending

Again, it is solidarity rather than plurality that is revealed through socio-cultural items of dress and food; rites of passage such as birth, deaths and marriages; and, last but not least, language. Food and drink can operate not only as powerful signifiers of class but also of acculturation and assimilation.

Dress is also a very visible public marker declaring one’s allegiance, identity or political preference. For example, in the Baba community, the Chinese dress and pigtail is discarded. The men wear the Western dress (which shows assimilation to the British raj), while the women wear the Malay dress (which shows assimilation to Malay society). However, the kebaya (fitted top) is adapted to become more embroidered and trimmed with lace and made of translucent material showing off a camisole (or a brassiere in the 20th century) underneath. It is worn with a kerosang (three golden brooches, often set with embedded diamonds), while the batik sarong is held with a silver belt – all these ostensibly to distinguish themselves from the poorer Malays (Koh & Ho, 2009).

As the Malays gradually lost their political and economic power to the British raj, more and more the diverse races began to signal their assimilation to British rather than Malay values. For example, Donald Wijasuriya, a second-generation Sinhalese, recalled that while a poorer rural Tamil woman might take to the sarong and his migrant grandmother always wore the sari, his wife “almost never uses it”, preferring a Western dress instead (Arseculeratne, 1992, p. 93). So, too, towards the end of the colonial period, the younger Nonya ladies, unlike their mothers and grandmothers, discarded the sarong kebaya for Western clothing. This gradual aspiration towards British rather than Malay culture is also evident in culinary etiquette. For example, eating with one’s hands is fine if one wishes to identify with Malay culture, and this was the case in the 19th century. But if they wanted to identify with the English colonials – as was evident from the early 20th century – many Chinese, Indians and Eurasians took their meals with forks, spoons and knives (Clammer, 1979, p. 16).²⁵

In the area of sports, the later-generational and richer Chinese and Indians acquired a British taste for lawn tennis, golf, swimming, body-building, chess and racing. However, in matters of food, they acquired a Malay orientation. For example, Chinese Peranakan food is an intriguing mix of Chinese and Malay dishes. The nonya dish of babi pong tay, for example, is similar to the Chinese dish tau yew bak (pork belly slowly braised in garlic and soy sauce) but with a spicy Malay flavour of salted soybean, cinnamon and pounded shallots. Another example is nonya laksa, a dish in which the Peranakans combine Chinese coarse rice noodle with a Malay-style curry. Peranakan desserts such as nonya kueh (cake) is inspired from a liberal use of Malayan products such as coconut milk, pandan leaf and shredded coconut (Koh & Ho, 2009).

In Indian Chetty households, a similarly inspired fusion can be seen. There are Malay-style ikan bilis (anchovies fried with chilli paste), sambal tumis (fried chilli), acar (pickles), Indian sambar (lentil curry) and meat peruthals (stir fried with Indian spices) and Malay desserts such as pulot seraykaya, pulot hitam and kuih wajis on the same table (Thiyagaraj, 1998, p. 92). Linguistically, one encounters code-mix, such as: “kasi malai” (“give the garland away”), in which kasi (give) is a Malay word and malai is a Tamil word for “garland”. Their marriage ceremonies also signalled a congenial blend. For example, in a Chetty household, Hindu rites and practices include the observance of the “gift-tray” and “dip for the ring” ceremonies, which require the newlyweds to plunge their hands into a pot three times to retrieve from within a knife and a shell or a ring; the “tying of the thalli” (nuptial knot) by the bride and groom; and the exchanging of the toe rings ceremony between bride and groom. On the other hand, the Malay elements include the Malay chongkak (a game set consisting of a wooden board and 98 pieces of cowry shells), a baju kebaya (traditional Malay blouse-dress combination) and bunga rampai (a mix of pandan leaves and fragrant flowers given to guests as souvenirs) on a gift-tray and Malay desserts together with Indian spices and sweets on a large tray (Thiyagaraj, 1998, p. 86).

The religion that the migrants took with them was also not immune to outside influences. For example, the Baba religion was syncretic in the sense that while many retained the worship of Chinese gods as well as a Chinese view of the cosmos, their divinatory techniques were very Malay (Clammer, 1979). In addition,

their marriage ceremony turned from being patriarchal and patrilineal to a more bilateral and bifocal one; for example, the practice of uxorilocal marriage in which the groom moves as a son-in-law into the family of the bride’s parents (Clammer, 1980, p. 111). The later-generational Chinese were also not averse to learning Buddhism from the Ceylonese in their midst. For example, the English-educated Chinese and Babas were known to pray at the Sri Lankaramaya temple (Arseculeratne 1992, p. 155) to the extent that by the 20th century, the service, which was originally conducted in Singhalese, had to be conducted in English. These Chinese also incorporated and adapted the Theravada practice of text recitation, lectures, discussions, religious classes and publication of some of their own Taoist and Mahayana tracts (Arseculeratne, 1992,p. 150). In return, the migrant Singhalese adopted a mishmash of customs from their host cultures. For example, instead of opting for cremation, which was the normal funereal practice in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) then, they instead wore black arm-bands (like the Christians) and went thrice around the grave (like the Taoists). Arseculeratne (1992, p. 164) reported that visiting monks from Sri Lanka were “often shocked at the ceremony”.²⁶

Conclusion

This paper has drawn from the social and linguistic history of colonial Singapore to propose a solidarity-plurality cline with parameters such as dress, food, art forms, religious and literary activities as well as familial practices such as rites of passage, with a view to study the processes of acculturation and assimilation. It has been shown that while each ethnically distinct group held its own religion, language and culture, it was not averse to communal interaction with other groups, and this took place not just in the marketplace. The respective patois that resulted and which is still evident in the spoken languages of Singapore today is a poignant reminder of the combining and blending that had occurred. This popular intermingling may not have simply been just “multiracialism” but a deeper, more engaged “interculturalness” that is less prevalent today.

In brief, the notion of plural society does not satisfactorily explain the vibrant multicultural phenomenon in Singapore. The colonial origins of multiculturalism are certainly not to be overlooked, but the phenomenon has been nurtured by many forces before, during and after colonial rule, which can be understood only from a multifocal perspective exploring those sometimes obscure forces. The most fascinating and important point to make about Singapore’s multicultural society is that, unlike similar societies elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the multicultural or plural element has been successfully integrated into the political and social edifice (or structure), thus ensuring its endurance and social harmony, which is further fostered by the ways in which a hybrid way of life is accepted rather unquestioningly by its people. This acceptance is clearly borne out by social and cultural evidence as argued in this paper, which is generally ignored by scholars who seem to find the notion of a plural society sufficient to explain the phenomenon.