Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History of Singapore's Plural Society (Writing Past Colonialism)

hidden hands and divided landscapes a penal history of singapore’s plural society

Anoma Pieris

writing past colonialism

hidden hands and divided landscapes

Writing past colonialism is the signature book series of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, based in Melbourne, Australia. By postcolonialism we understand modes of writing and artistic production that critically engage with and contest the legacy and continuing mindset and practices of colonialism, and inform debate about the processes of globalization. This manifests itself in a concern with difference from the Euro-American, the global, and the norm. The series is also committed to publishing works that seek “to make a difference,” both in the academy and outside it. Our hope is that books in the series will • engage with contemporary issues and problems relating to colonialism

and postcolonialism

• attempt to reach a broad constituency of readers • address the relation between theory and practice • be interdisciplinary in approach as well as subject matter • experiment with new modes of writing and methodology

INSTITUTE OF POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES | WRITING PAST COLONIALISM

Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African Auto/biography   Edited by Judith Lütge Coullie, Stephan Meyer, Thengani Ngwenya, and Thomas Olver Boundary Writing: An Exploration of Race, Culture, and Gender Binaries in Contemporary Australia   Edited by Lynette Russell Postcolonizing the International: Working to Change the Way We Are   Edited by Phillip Darby Dark Writing: geography, performance, design   Paul Carter Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History of Singapore’s Plural Society   Anoma Pieris

hidden hands and divided landscapes A PENAL HISTORY OF SINGAPORE’S PLURAL SOCIETY

Anoma Pieris

  University of Hawai‘i Press  Honolulu

© 2009 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 14 13 12 11 10 09

6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pieris, Anoma. Hidden hands and divided landscapes : a penal history of Singapore’s plural society / Anoma Pieris. p.  cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3221-6 (hard cover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8248-3354-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Prisoners—Singapore—History.  2. Convict labor—Singapore—History.  3. Prisons—Singapore—History.  I. Title. HV8454.A6 2009 365’.95957—dc22 2008039553

Publication of this work was assisted by a publication grant from the University of Melbourne. University of Hawai`i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Series designed by Leslie Fitch Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

To Jeanie Reyes for her kindness and inspiration

CONTENTS

Illustrations  ix Acknowledgments  xi Chapter 1. Introduction  1 Chapter 2. Divided Landscapes  30 Chapter 3. The Colonial Prison  62 Chapter 4. Hidden Hands   95 Chapter 5. The Perils of Association  130 Chapter 6. The Battle for the City  156 Chapter 7. The Citadel  188 Chapter 8. Conclusion  217 Appendices  237 Notes  249 Glossary  319 Bibliography  321 Index  343

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Coleman Survey Disturbed by Tiger, 1831  29 2. Fragments of construction materials from Bras Basah Park site in 2001/2002  32 3. Comparative study of urban fabric in the three Straits Settlements  44 4. Town Plan of Singapore, showing grid system  47 5. Comparative study of early nineteenth-century urban fabric, showing   European and non-European settlement patterns   48 6. George Town, Penang, showing old jail and convict lines in the 1803 map  71 7. Her Majesty’s Jail, Singapore, 1848  80 8. Colonial Jail, Bandar Hilir, Melaka, 1872  82 9. Colonial Jail, Penang 1872  84 10. Convict Jail, Singapore, 1857  89 11. Mortar Mill, Government House, Singapore  103 12. The three prisons in Singapore during the 1860s  107 13. Singapore, Criminal Prison  110 14. General Monthly Muster, Singapore Convict Jail  113 15. Conjectured drawing of Convict Jail, Singapore, 1860s–1870s  115 16. Head Tindal Maistri and Convict of the fifth class  117 17. St Andrews Cathedral, Singapore  120 18. New Court House/Public Offices, Singapore, 1868  124 19. Mental Asylum and General Hospital, Singapore, in 1869 with   photograph of the hospital from the 1860s  127 20. Hinges ordered for Government House Singapore  152 21. Penang’s street-based ethnic communities  161 22. Dato Koya shrine in Penang  164 23. Conjectured path of the 1856 Riot in Singapore  178 24. Conjectured path of 1867 riots in Penang  184 25. The Barricades  185 26. Defenses at Singapore   194 27. Singapore Defenses, showing range of fire directed inward  198 28. Criminal Prison, Pearl’s Hill, Singapore, 1881  207 29. The Cellular Ward for Europeans in the Pearl’s Hill Prison, Singapore  208 30. Government House Singapore, approaching completion  213 ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My grateful thanks to my professors at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, Dell Upton, Nezar Al Sayyad, and Greig Crysler, for their continuous encouragement and support throughout the time I spent at Berkeley. I am particularly indebted to Peter Zinoman and Eugene Irschick in the Department of History, who gave me the tools for interdisciplinary research. Special thanks to Clare Anderson, from the University of Warwick, and to Laura Nader for broadening my scholarship. Several institutions and archives facilitated this research, including the National Archives, Kew; the British Library; the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Library, London; the Singapore National Archives, National Library, National History Museum and the Central Library, National University of Singapore; and the National Archives of Sri Lanka and Penang. My thanks to the National History Museum for including me in the excavations conducted on the Bras Basah site. I would like to thank Dr. Khoo Khay Kim, Mary Turnbull, Irangani Dunuwila Ratwatte, Sonny Dunuwila, Justice Choor Singh, Samuel Dhoraisingam, Dr. Wimalaratne, Dr. S. N. B. Arseculeratne, Durand Appuhamy, T. K. Sabapathy, Rozita Bte Ahmad, G. Paranthaman, Jon Lim, and several residents of Melaka, Penang, and Singapore for interviews and correspondence related to this topic. Khoo Salma Nasution and Abdur-Razzaq Lubis and the Penang Heritage Trust were extremely supportive in Penang. Thanks also to Ann Gilkerson, Angela Wong, Lynne Horiuchi, Alexandra Sauvegrain, Yuma Totani, Elizabeth Chandra, Amita Satyal, Duanfang Lu, Ellen Sacco, and my many friends at Berkeley in the architectural history program and at International House, who supported me while I was writing my doctoral thesis. The Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore employed me during fieldwork and provided the collegial environment for my research. Jothie Soundarajah helped in sourcing and collating information in Melbourne, and Anna Maskiell digitized my images for publication. The Spiro Kostof Award for incoming PhD student, AAUW International Fellowship, Pacific Rim Mini Grant Program, The Southeast Asia Center Grant in Aid Program at the University of California, Berkeley, the Humanities Summer Research Grant Program, and the Chancellor’s Dissertation Year Fellowship, the xi

xii

acknowledgments

University of California, Berkeley, provided grants for this research during the course of my studies. The Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne provided funds for publication, the preparation of images, and purchase of copyrights. Publication of this work was assisted by a publication grant from the University of Melbourne. My special thanks to Phillip Darby at the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Melbourne, who guided me through the review process with a great deal of patience and concern. Most important, my dear friends Lai Chee Kien and Shalini Amerasinghe Ganendra; my parents, Lankeswara and Sita Pieris; Bish and Shanti Dissanayake; Jeanie Reyes and my partner Athanasios have provided the constant friendship, love, and support that have made this book possible. This research was published most recently in conference proceedings for the Center for Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Adelaide, 2007, and the International Planning History Society and Asian Studies Association of Australia conferences in 2008. Sections of chapter 6 were published as “Tikiri Banda Dunuwila, A Reluctance to Labor” and “The Perils of Association? John Thomas Keyt,” in The Ceylankan (Journal of the Sri Lankan Association of Australia), 2003. A related paper, “On Dropping Bricks and Other Disconcerting Subjects: unearthing convict histories in Singapore,” was published in Fabrications (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand), December 2005.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Two parallel themes, of the colonial city as a model of pluralism and of the colonial prison as its primary testing ground, intersect in the writing of this book. The interlinking of two otherwise self-contained approaches to history is its original contribution. Conceptually, this book proposes that notions of social, cultural, or political division were introduced into the colonial dual city and that a “dialogic” urban environment emerged.1 Some of the complexities of a heterogeneous social and political context are examined without reducing this topic to the familiar binaries found in colonial literature. This book examines how a plural political system aimed at managing diverse ethnic communities, in the larger material context of a colonial urban project, was first imagined and tested through the colonial prison. It reviews the period during which the Straits Settlements functioned as an Indian presidency, 1825–1867, and as a penal settlement for transported Indian convicts, 1825–1873, thus revisiting Singapore’s urban history through the lens of coerced labor (see Appendix A). Consequently, specific attention is paid to a racial minority that has often remained on the margins of both colonial and national discourse and through whom specific discursive claims can be tested. This strategy of reading the center from the margins allies this book with well-tested approaches in postcolonial studies.2 Postcolonial Studies first emerged as a discrete conceptual framework for comparative literature and history during the 1980s. Influenced by Edward Said’s discussion of “orientalism,” a coterie of scholars, predominantly of South Asian origin, exposed the race and class politics of colonial and nationalist discourses and revisited issues of modernity, citizenship, and rationality.3 Poststructural scholarship—Michel Foucault’s critique of the Enlightenment and Antonio Gramsci’s ideas on hegemony, resistance, and subaltern consciousness—was extremely influential in their work, which looked closely at the asymmetrical constructions of power and knowledge in post colonies.4 The Subaltern Studies Collective further 



hidden hands and divided landscapes

“deconstructed” colonial and nationalist historiography so that studies of nonelites and minorities might expand the field.5 Whereas a similar approach can be found in the earlier work of E. P. Thomson and Eric Wolf and in concurrent histories and geographies of Southeast Asia (during the late 1980s and early 1990s) by James Warren, Carl Trocki, and James Scott, for example, the Subaltern Studies Collective was largely driven by postcolonial political agendas.6 The critical contribution of these collective approaches was in their selfreflexivity, in scrutinizing their location within academia, and in their objective of tracing the political roots of present conditions in colonial and nationalist pasts. As Breckenridge and van der Veer observed, “the postcolonial pathologies of various colonial sites are being globalized and re-projected into the politics of the metropole.”7 A key issue raised by such projections was that of marginality, the violent communal cleavages that haunted the project of independence and the predicaments of immigrants from former colonies settled at the margins of former metropolitan centers of colonialism. Homi Bhabha described this latter condition of “liminality” as a potential site from which “the dissonant even dissident histories and voices—women, the colonized, minority groups, the bearers of policed sexualities” could be applied to interrogating national culture.8 By addressing the social injustices produced by the dialectical material environments of the colonial encounter, postcolonial scholarship provided the tools to theorize race and class in a relationship of power and resistance. The approaches discussed above are critical to the argument of this book. Scholarship on the colonial Straits Settlements, and indeed on contemporary Malaysia and Singapore, is often contained by the “orientalist” racial structures of a colonial plural society, of its Chinese, Malay, Indian and “Other” categories (CMIO), even as it attempts to facilitate the horizontal operation of class and labor.9 The minority “Indian” community, which came to the settlements with colonial enterprise, is invariably marginalized in revisionist narratives that offer “Malay” and “Chinese” communities a greater sense of entitlement. As prisoners, indentured workers, soldiers, policemen, servants of the state, as an educated class within the colonial administration, or as mutineers and anticolonial nationalists, Indians frequently find their loyalties under scrutiny, and the community is seen to be positioned at the two extremes of colonial society.10 This perception is either challenged or reiterated in scholarly discourse.11 Minority issues and identity politics often reproduce plural boundaries, and indeed this book may appear to be doing likewise. Its thesis, however, is more complex. Whereas the choices available to the Indian minority within the colonial economy were shaped by specific forms of complicity, repression, and resistance, this asymmetrical power relationship was not necessarily shared by other racial groups. The containment of the prison within the colonial grid

introduction



and the placement of other immigrant communities outside the European town, in a plural manifestation of the colonial divided landscape, suggested as much. However, although the relationship of Indian immigrants and prisoners with the colonial government reproduced a social dialectic of both race and class, the settler economy and the evolving relationships between ethnic communities undermined its impact. The plural society, although structured by a particularly divisive urban template, did not always respect its social and spatial boundaries. In exploring history through the experiences of a minority, this research adopts some of the approaches of Postcolonial Studies. It believes, in the tradition of Bhabha’s investigations of the location of culture, that questions raised at the margins of the national project can be used to scrutinize ontological assumptions that weaken practices of social equity.12 Non-European examples are applied quite deliberately for comparative discussions of the prison system, thus acknowledging Dipesh Chakrabarty’s vigilance against Eurocentric patterns of historiography.13 Finally, faced with the extreme paucity of sources outside the colonial record, Subaltern Studies methodologies are employed to reread available material.14 Undoubtedly an awareness of the dialectic between capital and labor, which informs both labor history and Postcolonial Studies, is an important undercurrent.15 Moving beyond the postcolonial dialectic, this book is a contemporary engagement with M. M. Bakhtin’s theories that have been applied very recently to discussions of architecture and urbanism in Singapore.16 Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, as it is used in the work of Robbie Goh, expands and enriches a field dominated by dialectical analyses. Goh draws attention to “the multiple discourses about the city, which may not only disagree with the intended meanings of the built environment, but open up those meanings by fostering a critical consciousness of their textual nature and their reliance on a network of intertextual supports.”17 Whereas the urban dialectic focuses on the governmental and market authorities of these processes, that is, the contradictory, contested, internally differentiated, and continuous border crossings described by Saskia Sassen, Goh suggests that “the most practical and commonplace urban dialectic is in fact a dialogics of the city.”18 This semiotic reconceptualization of the city offers ways of understanding a polyglot environment where the dualities explored in critiques of colonialism post-Said, or the readings of power in monocultural environments in the work of Marx or Foucault, are complicated by other horizontal forms of social, cultural, and political competition and contestation. Armed with all these various approaches, this book takes on the difficult task of unraveling the penal history of a plural society. The manner in which definitions of pluralism shifted during the first five decades of British rule in the Straits



hidden hands and divided landscapes

Settlements, before it be came a crown colony, are its concern. The location of a minority in a racially divided city provides fresh insights into colonialism and its political formations, whereby ideas of proper subjecthood appear to be conceptualized at the margins. The study of the colonial city through a prison system devised for a racial minority offers a different history of Singapore and the Straits Settlements. My primary concern, therefore, is in physical and social divisions.

The Divided Landscape In post-Enlightenment Europe, the landscape was idealized as a category separate from human activity, rooted in a specific Western discourse on modernity, where vision was a dominant metaphor in the observation and representation of the world.19 Its nineteenth-century interpretations were shaped by the commodification and exploitation of the landscape through industrial capitalism, the construction of national identity through geographic belonging, and the interpretation of unfamiliar colonial environments (or the desire to transform them) by Europeans. The term “landscape” as it is used in this book describes a broad analytical category quite independent of the fields of empiricist archaeology and art history.20 With the contribution of human geographers, even the idea of landscape as a visually apprehended territory has been reinterpreted “as a set of relationships between people and places, which provide the context for everyday conduct.”21 For example, the anthology Changing Landscapes of Singapore by Teo et al. reflects on fifty years of changes in the physical and socioeconomic landscapes of the city, successfully engaging with terrains of community, nationhood, and globalization.22 The collection includes symbolic and forgotten landscapes in addition to natural and geographic ones. The recognition that landscapes are relational and become meaningful when inscribed by human activity has been critical for the deconstruction of particular forms of spatial determinism. Likewise, “divided landscape” can be interpreted as describing social, cultural, or political divisions related to the exercise of power. Dialectical and metaphorical interpretations of space have pervaded scholarship on architecture and urbanism in recent decades, arising from philosophical explorations of difference within late capitalist or neoliberal economic frameworks. They contrast ideologies of identity, place making, and familiarity, of “ontological security,” with notions of liminality, ambiguity, and hybridity.23 This scholarship largely focuses on contemporary cities and the problems associated with globalization, urban expansion, and demographic change. They replace, to some extent, earlier dialectical analyses of colonialism, Marxism, and the cold war, which provided specific social, economic, and political interpretations of duality. Recent scholarship on Southeast Asian cities exemplifies this

introduction



trend, where writings on the contemporary city dwarf historical research. The rejection of history, the renewed focus on metropolitan phenomena produced by rapid urban expansion, and the exploration of difference within the cosmopolitan social fabric of a shifting political scene is symptomatic of this genre of writing. Many recent publications demonstrate its value. Within the wider scholarship on Southeast Asian urbanism, this book contributes to postcolonial approaches that bring historical questions back into focus. Notable contributions to this genre begin with Postcolonial Space(s) by Nalbantoglu and Wong, where theoretical questions about colonial history are raised in relation to issues of contemporary identity, political suppression, and nationalist self-construction.24 The work of Abidin Kusno explores colonial political strategies, deployed by the Indonesian nation-state and its institutions, in order to construct specific forms of subjectivity through modernity, tradition, poverty, and ethnicity, post-independence.25 Notions of marginality, hybridity, and difference reappear as critiques of the authoritarian state in Southeast Asian scholarship. Recent publications with titles such as Postcolonial Urbanism and Theorizing the Southeast Asian City as Text offer a range of interpretations linking historic Southeast Asian contexts to global processes.26 Contours of Culture by Robbie Goh falls squarely within this arena and will be discussed at length. Additionally, Jane M. Jacobs’ discussions of contemporary policies of “multiculturalism” in London and in Australia,27 and her work with Ruth Fincher on the divisive operations of ethnicity, race, poverty, and political identity in contemporary cities, are theoretically close to issues confronting Southeast Asian urbanism.28 Their discussions of internal colonization and the struggles over identity, resources, citizenship, and space, which are “framed in and through differences,” are particularly applicable to the Singaporean context.29 The notion of a plural or multicultural society, so critical to analyses of contemporary Australia or America and synonymous with our representations of many Southeast Asian cities in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, sets these approaches apart from discussions of South Asian urbanism. Whereas the contemporary operation of postcoloniality in metropolitan centers frames Southeast Asian urbanism to some extent, writings on South Asian architecture and urbanism are weighted toward the colonial period. A dialectical relationship with colonial authority and the absence of large-scale immigration carved an alternate historical trajectory in South Asia, which caused scholars to focus on colonial and national agendas, particularly in the years preceding economic liberalization. Distinctions made between the dual cities of the Indian subcontinent and the plural environments of Southeast Asia invariably shaped contrasting views of colonial urbanism in contemporary scholarship. However, the dual city is our starting point.



hidden hands and divided landscapes

The Colonial City The dual or dialectic thesis underlies many of the histories of colonial urban contexts. J. S. Furnivall, member of the Indian Civil Service, progressive reformer, and critic of colonialism during the 1950s, described “tropical dependencies” as dual economies made up of two distinct economic systems, capitalist and precapitalist, with a “western superstructure of business and administration rising above the native world.”30 Race relations that are asymmetrical, the struggle between capital and labor, and the conflicts caused by repression and resistance offer simultaneous social, economic, and political readings of the dialectic. Whereas in European urbanism we see a shift from preindustrial forms of social and legal segregation (based on traditional occupational divisions, ethnicity, and specific practices of apartheid) to physical separation based on class, the colonial dual city, following industrialization, incorporates both these features. The urban poor, servants, or slaves are integrated spatially with dominant members of society.31 The term “divided city,” which was used to illustrate economic and spatial divisions in Europe, typically describes racial segregation in the colonies, and “orientalist” accounts by travelers and colonists illustrate this point.32 They demonstrate that in many colonial societies, social distance based on race and class was interpreted as spatial distance and maintained through practices of differentiation, discrimination, and self-segregation, and by identifying deviance. Similarly in the American colonies, the white population resisted racial mixing by restricting housing choices through both formal and informal strategies. They produced ethnic ghettos marked by color and class difference.33 Plantations in the American South were physically segregated environments that were also divided internally by race, color, and labor practices.34 Issues of urban segregation are consequently part of a broader history of colonization, migration, and slavery. In architecture and urbanism, the historiography of the colonial city can be traced to the 1980s interest in Postcolonial Studies, when the influence of Said’s book Orientalism and Foucault’s theories of subjectivity first penetrated these fields. They informed a line of thinking originating in the work of Frantz Fanon, Janet Abu Lughod, and others, where specific notions of duality, based on readings of dialectic materialism, were first applied to discussions of the colonial city.35 Orientalist spatial strategies, representations of power, and the production of new forms of metropolitan and colonial subjectivity were subsequently explored in the work of Anthony King, Thomas Metcalf, Norma Evenson, Gwendolyn Wright, and Paul Rabinow, who may be regarded as the progenitors of this new approach.36 In their work, French and European colonies became a fertile ground for experiments in “middling modernism” or for a “colonial third culture” that draws on both European and indigenous sources.37 The patterns of dominance evident in colonial urban form were recognizable in various cultural

introduction



encounters, and numerous interpretations of the dialectic resulted, such as the gendering of colonial Algeria described in the work of Zeynep Çelik or contestation over Singapore’s public spaces in Singapore, described by the geographer Brenda Yeoh.38 Whereas late twentieth-century scholarship was focused on deconstructing systems of colonial authority, the work of a new generation of scholars, many of them published in the early twenty-first century, focuses on the decentered narratives of the subject populations on whom power was imposed. Indeed, this is the strongest area in South Asian architectural scholarship, investigated most recently in the anthology Colonial Modernities by Vikramaditya Prakash and Peter Scriver.39 The work of writers in this collection, including Jyoti Hosagrahar and Swati Chattopadhyay, take local Indian sources into account and explore indigenous constructions of modernity and forms of subjectivity outside or intersecting with elite, colonial, material culture.40 For example, Chattopadhyay challenges representations of the colonial dual city as separate and distinct, arguing that “the economic, political and social conditions of colonial culture penetrated the insularity of both towns.”41 Recent books by William Glover on Lahore and Jim Masselos on Bombay display a similar awareness of the complexity of the colonial condition.42 These authors apply Poststructuralist ideas of relative and relational analysis to an asymmetrical racial/cultural encounter, expanding the interpretive scope of indigenous sources.43 Southeast Asia, identified through itinerant kingdoms, migrant trajectories, and settler histories, offers a correspondingly different interpretation of colonial power relations and built environments. The conflation of immigrant and urban identities in many locales prevents the easy dissection of colonial society into “indigenous” versus “European,” and it injects issues of geographic belonging and displacement into an already uneven cultural mix. An extraordinary range of cultural responses characterizes the Southeast Asian colonial context and influences scholarship on its material culture. Considering Singapore as an illustration of this point, it was vulnerable to colonial political strategies and subject to economic zoning, racial segregation, and the exercise of authority through urban planning; in short, although it demonstrated many of the qualities attributed to the dual city, most of its population were voluntary settlers. Precolonial settlers similarly developed an “archipelagic pattern of flexible ethnicity,” which took the coexistence of Indian and Chinese immigrants with numerous Southeast Asian ethnic communities into account.44 Some of these groups were incorporated into existing social hierarchies while others remained distinct for cultural or economic reasons. In the immigrant environments of the Straits cities, the grid of streets and institutions gathered these diverse communities into a tabula rasa colonial experiment. While urban



hidden hands and divided landscapes

social divisions were planned and the structure of the economy was dialectical, in many respects the operation of power was both politically and socially differentiated due to the racial diversity of the settler population. The structural order was imposed to compensate for the lack of colonial authority, due to subordinate systems of self-government. This distinction, which markedly differentiates the experience of colonial architecture and urbanism in Southeast Asia from that of its South Asian counterpart, charts a very different terrain that this book has had to straddle. Located at the confluence of two influential approaches, this research on Indian convicts transported to the Straits Settlements draws on the interest in marginality, migration, and displacement evident in the orientation of postcolonial urbanism. More importantly, whereas confrontational forms of cultural politics, economic determinants, and class interests underline South Asian scholarship on such issues, Southeast Asian writings on postcolonial environments provide complex “dialogic” readings of these same phenomena. Interactions between racial groups, common spatial occupations, and contributions to and engagement with the colonial project override and often complicate evidence of resistance to colonial rule. The most interesting examples of such responses are generated in the application of the plural social model to the dual city.

Plural Citizenship J. S. Furnivall’s critique of colonial society has shaped our understanding of the plural model adopted in contemporary Singapore and Malaysia and in fact, one might argue, has reinforced it. The model is divisive rather than integrative, highlighting a critical difference between the division of labor in a culturally homogeneous society (Adam Smith’s model) and a society in which cultural cleavages may be exacerbated through economic competition.45 In Furnivall’s view, the colonial “market mentality” destroyed precolonial social relations, idealized by him around corporate tribal or village life. Institutional self-sufficiency and external forces precluded the development of “a common social will” directed toward the general welfare of the population or territory. Should colonial government be removed, anarchy would result. In short, under colonial rule, integration as a common territory was achieved through coercion. Furnivall’s definition has been scrutinized by numerous scholars over the past thirty or so years, and many omissions and weaknesses have been highlighted. Societies labeled plural, observes Judith Nagata, “are invariably defined politically at a maximum level . . . and marked by considerable social and cultural heterogeneity at lower levels.”46 In short, the assumption that ethnic reference groups take primacy over national loyalties and the focus on

introduction



social and cultural incompatibility is often used to justify political coercion (in both colonial and postcolonial periods). Conversely, in Nagata’s view, ethnicity is a dependent variable very much situated and contingent upon various political, religious, linguistic, and even personal factors, each of which could independently constitute a normative reference group.47 Conflict occurs when most of these cleavages coincide and are, in the history of the region, crystalized into ethnic identities and political categories after independence. Census categories, identity cards, and political programs that see socioeconomic problems and solutions in ethnic terms, argues Nagata, close down the space for ethnic maneuver and circumscribe and rigidify the roles of certain groups. For example, in Malaysia, political parties were organized along communal rather than ideological lines and “alleged ‘class based’ parties [were] strictly curtailed by government fiat.”48 A critical detail in Nagata’s argument is the non-emergence of a class consciousness in Malaysia, due, in her view, to the persistence of systems of patronage among the Chinese and Malays. The association of the trade union movement with the Kuomintan during the 1930s led to its emasculation, whereas Indian labor unions did not offer a comparable threat.49 Similar processes where procommunist unions were co-opted by progovernment institutions in Singapore have been outlined by Chua Beng Huat.50 Although there is evidence of economic stratification that cuts across ethnic lines in both Malaysia and Singapore, it is not manifested in popular political ideology. Nagata believes that there may be different levels of pluralism in the private and public spheres, where a society may be integrated in public life at the level of political institutions and compartmentalized in private life in the cultural arena. In such examples ethnicity operates in a domestic or ritual domain while nationality defines the public political sphere.51 Arguably, the converse may also be an attribute of plurality, and academic definitions may well be informing and fixing political biases. Undoubtedly, particular forms of pluralism operated at a structural, cultural, and social level in the Straits Settlements, in fact more so than in other colonial environments, and were hardened during the transformation of the region from multicentered to monopoly economies. However, as argued by Robert Hefner, Europeans did not create a plural society. They “seized the commanding heights of an already plural civilization, expanding and expropriating its wealth while re-organizing and segregating its constituent Asian communities.”52 The absence of a common social will, which Furnivall attributed to the transience of citizens, may in fact have existed in a very different form in the incorporation of immigrant communities to local structures of government.53 In dominions, which in Furnivall’s argument had plural features rather than a plural society,

10

hidden hands and divided landscapes

a common social will (shaped by cultural hegemony) produced a bar on immigration, whereas in tropical societies, immigration was anticipated and was incorporated through strategies of sedentarization. As argued by Hefner, it was in objectifying immigrants that the colonial era achieved its most enduring categorical legacy.54 By assigning different ethnic groups to specialized positions and by offering political or economic privileges to newcomers and minorities, Europeans emphasized the distinction between indigenous communities and immigrants. In short, the assimilation demanded of immigrants in British dominions and their selection through racist policies was not mirrored in Britain’s Asian colonies. Notions of economic stratification, ethnic division, and political entitlement thus complicate our analysis of the plural model, reaffirming observations that Furnivall’s economic criteria cannot be taken at face value. Khoo Kay Kim suggests that internal factors, such as the propensity to maintain civilizational culture, the emergence of ethnic nationalism in the early twentieth century, and the transience of ethnic groups, collectively reinforced plural boundaries, more so than colonial determinants.55 We are thus confronted by two models, economic and cultural, which coalesce to inform postindependence political strategies. However, there is a commonly held definition that informs analyses of physical space and cultural institutions. As stated by Chua Beng Huat and Kwok Kian Woon, There was a relatively impermeable ethnic division of labour along ethnic lines and physical proximity of the ethnically classified “races” did not translate into social integration; transactions across ethnic lines were largely economic. Spatially, ethnic communities lived in relative isolation from each other in their respective enclaves . . . [and] the most ubiquitous community establishments were religious institutions such as mosques, Chinese temples, and the respective vernacular primary schools.56

The public/private dialectic raised by Nagata is evident in this definition and is one avenue through which we might reconsider the plural landscape. However, if we are to follow the tradition of recent studies of decentered colonial subjects, we need alternative tools through which to study both the weaknesses of the colonial plural model and its postcolonial resilience. We are confronted with several arguments: that the model was originally one of integration, assimilation, and cultural hybridity; that separation into plural categories by colonial census and nationalist structures responded to increased immigration; and that economic divisions across race rather than class effected these changes. The question we are most concerned with is whether these transformations can be

introduction

11

traced in the evolution of the colonial built environment. Recent works by Chua Beng Huat and Norman Edwards, Carl Trocki, Johannes Widodo, and Evers and Korff, which focus on various aspects of Southeast Asian urbanism, consistently link social, political, and spatial practices.57

The Dialogic Model How can we conceptualize a settler society made up of diverse and hybrid cultural groups, each having very different relationships with the government— an environment where cultural forms and economic interests intersect? Contrary to the distinctions drawn in the model for a plural society, and in tandem with subsequent critiques of it, we may argue that both contestation and collaboration between immigrant groups was evident in the Straits Settlements. The familiar duality of colonizer and colonized, typical of most colonial societies, is not replicated in the Straits context, particularly in this early period. The constant flux of immigrant populations challenges fixed or stable interpretations of community and ethnicity. Relationships between immigrant communities may in fact appear more significant to this history than does the role of the colonial administration. The part played by the Indian prisoners within this social matrix, however, was forged on a different geography, under a different kind of authority. Similar forms of cooperation or resistance are not evident in the responses of other immigrant communities. How then do we conceptualize the horizontal forces operating within such a society? Two previous analyses of dialogism, in nineteenth-century South India by Eugene Irschick and contemporary Singapore by Robbie Goh, have provided useful analytical tools for advancing this research.58 Irschick describes the sedentarization of South Indians as a dialogic encounter between colonial administrators and Tamil subjects, where the dynamic involvement of both groups in the construction of a Tamil past and in the determination of the community’s future was evident. Robbie Goh’s recent application of dialogism to an interpretation of contemporary Singapore provides an analysis of the multiple layers of meaning accumulated over time in specific material artifacts and spatial practices.59 His research provides a robust study of a heterogeneous social condition where power relationships manifest themselves in cultural forms that may contain and channel social conflicts without radicalizing them.60 Goh is particularly critical of the resilience of the dual or segregated city paradigm inherited from analyses of colonial cities. He introduces dialogism as a methodology for moving beyond historical binaries while including debates on globalization or labor subjectivity. However, while providing historical/textual readings of its multivalent physical manifestations, he contains his interpretation of dialogism

12

hidden hands and divided landscapes

within the broadening sociopolitical frameworks that followed independence and a top-down system of government.61 Both the above examples draw on M. M. Bakhtin’s interpretation of discourse in the novel as composed of “dialogues,” the social diversity of speech types and differing individual voices that contribute to its totality.62 In Bakhtin’s argument this multiplicity leads to the novel’s “heteroglossia” and “dialogization” when compared with the “monologic” unraveling of the epic form. Both these literary forms function as “chronotopes,” capturing particular notions of time and place in which the use of dialogue establishes the novel’s contemporaneity as opposed to the epic’s representation of the heroic past. Thus the time-space of the novel enables the practice of heterogeneity by gathering it discursively in dialogues.63 When applied to historic analyses (like those discussed above), the operation of power and responses to it are understood very differently within the dialogic thesis, which anticipates compliance and complicity as well as resistance. It suggests that even when dealing with an overdetermined political system that excludes certain democratic processes, such as colonialism or postcolonial Singapore, it is important to acknowledge that symbiotic relationships can continue to be forged across society and beyond geographic boundaries. Dialogism can be applied in analyses of circumstances wherein varying relationships to authority, differentiated by class and race, provoked multiple loyalties or forms of resistance that were not necessarily radical or revolutionary. In the case of the Straits Settlements, for example, colonial rule was acknowledged and engaged with at a structural level and challenged on cultural fronts. More importantly, the mutual recognition of the prevailing power structure is not always critical to this condition. As observed by Rob Shields, “the lack of promise of a synthesis” differentiates dialogical from dialectical processes.64 Dialogism provides us with social relationships that may operate both vertically and horizontally in relation to the operation of power. Additionally, the dialogic imagination looks to the past and the present. The Straits Settlements, where diverse immigrant cultural practices are drawn into a modern spatial template, and are in fact wholly contained within it, presents several scenarios that can be conceptualized through such interpretations. Its temporal and popular dimension, generated by diverse discursive cultural and linguistic practices, suggests an intersection of dialogism with subaltern histories, venturing beyond the familiar dialectic. For example, the bazaar, which is reduced in Furnivall’s argument to a metaphor for the plural society, that is, a domain where social organizations are subordinated to the economy, might be read, conversely, as a productive site where dialogic forms of social cohesion are possible.65 In Bakhtin’s interpretation, the equivalent of the bazaar

introduction

13

is the fair, marketplace, or carnival, where resistance to authority takes many forms that are performative, urban, and transgressive. For example, he uses the term “billingsgate,” after the old London fish market, to describe ambivalent abuse and folk humor that is free of censorship and class distinctions, thus linking his theories of time-space to specific sites.66 The free and familiar marketplace relationship temporarily suspended social hierarchies, unlike the hierarchy and etiquette that dominated social life in palaces, churches, institutions, and private homes.67 The carnival on feast days was filled with the laughter and parody of groups that fall outside arenas of power, property, and economy. “Carnivalesque” practices, moreover, included symbolic inversions and evasions rather than confrontations, producing a populist utopian vision of the world. Thus dialogical landscapes, whether physical or relational, temporarily enabled the articulation of difference within otherwise licensed domains. More importantly, “because it is not grounded in the functionalist desire to describe or represent an empirical reality,” the dialogic crosses constantly between the “real” and “represented,” “discovering the temporal and spatial character of cultures,” observes Shields.68 It is particularly useful for examining diverse and hybrid—“heteroglot”—cultural experiences, such as those produced by immigrant groups in a newly established colonial settlement. Symbolic religious and cultural representations, diasporic memories, and contestation over new turf can all be accommodated within Bakhtin’s interpretation of the dialogic. In the Singapore example, the relationships within and between ethnic groups, between the government and settlers, and between the settlers and their countries of origin must all be taken into account for an adequate analysis of the Straits social context, as must the politics of a settlement colony dependent on the economies of immigrant groups. We may imagine that the priorities that govern the population in the Straits are very different from those in Bengal or Hanoi, for example, where economic and political groupings were linked to various forms of institutional repression. The Straits Settlements did not have a comparable history of indigenous opposition to colonial annexation. Furthermore, administrative control was centered in India until 1867. Ethnic communities continued to maintain their autonomy, mobility, and regional identities, which made direct government difficult, while varying systems of self-governance were adopted by the Chinese, the Malays, and the Indian penal population. Under these conditions, the reception and response to authority is more telling than forms of direct resistance to it. The spatial and cultural practices of the native populations inscribed the colonial landscape with alternative meanings and desires that were often incomprehensible to Europeans. Additionally, the presence of a large convict population reinforced colonial authority but also troubled bourgeois ideas of morality.

14

hidden hands and divided landscapes

This book argues that the multivalent structures, intrinsic to the contemporary Southeast Asian context and debated upon by many postcolonial scholars, emerged under colonial rule in the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, that the Singapore prison appeared distinctive because of the multiple dialogic forces against which it was constantly being read. As a colonial institution, the prison invariably informed a wider historical register of architectural representations that embellished or discredited the colonial state. Its marginalization within positivist histories of the period and its aggrandization in prison reports suggests the prison’s already difficult location and dialectical tensions. However, the division of penal labor by race around the construction of segregated colonial urban landscapes and institutions suggests a far more heterogeneous basis for this topic, grounded in varied forms of social contestation. As argued in this research, while divisive strategies applied to bodies and spaces were indeed realized in the experimental ground of the colonial prison, its porosity, centrality, and system of self-governance modified these intentions in unexpected ways. Heterogeneity, typically used in orientalist narratives to essentialize the colonized into a disorderly collective, may be used in this instance to offer competing views of the colonial condition.

Hidden Hands Penal environments typically intensify divisive spatial and social conditions existing in the larger social fabric and can be regarded as sites for the production and denial of citizenship. Indeed, as argued by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, the cellular form of the nineteenth-century “panopticon” penitentiary was originally conceived as an extension of larger processes of individuation and rationalization achieved through what was projected as a more humane system of punishment.69 Reform through isolation and under surveillance objectified prisoners, disciplining them into governable/docile subjects, and punishment was directed at the soul rather than at the physical body of the prisoner. The prison, moreover, was a total institution in a host of other bourgeois institutions whose disciplinary practices enabled the distribution of power throughout the social body. Following the work of Foucault, the panopticon became a widely used metaphor for critiquing the hegemonic authority of governmental systems.70 In Madness and Civilization, Foucault drew parallels between the construction of delinquency and “the punitive city” as the site for a new modern subjectivity, and he demonstrated how urban and institutional ideologies were integrated into the processes of secularization in Europe.71 The colonial prison, although instrumental in supporting comparable forms of cultural hegemony, did not demonstrate a similar propensity for humane

introduction

15

systems of punishment. Neither reform nor remorse were expected of the colonial prisoner. Indeed, this distinction between external coercion and internalized self-discipline, an important attribute of modern power identified by Foucault, was absent from the colonial context. Access to colonial institutions and pedagogy was largely underwritten by class interests and confined to colonial elites. Coercion, centralized authority, and the construction of difference, categorized in terms of collective identities (race, class, caste, gender), were tools too integral to the colonial project to be abandoned for “enlightened” processes of political rationalization. The colonial prison was instead an unwieldy hybrid of two opposing movements toward centralized and capillary manifestations of power. Centralization was retained through its urban location, punitive regime, and labor coercion, while the dissemination of penal authority was achieved by interpreting these very attributes as instruments of reform and self-governance. Structures for authoritarian rule and democratic individuation were often clumsily wedded together in the space(s) of the colonial prison. By the 1840s the European panopticon had evolved into the ultimate model in an experiment in total institutions that exemplified the workings of the modern state. However, the colonial prison of the same period was a facility for warehousing local criminals or transportees. Landmark penal reforms, which changed the landscape of confinement in Britain in the 1840s, 1860s, and 1870s, were felt in the colonies with diverse results and carceral discipline; the separate system and scientific criminology were used to very different ends. In fact, the divergence of reform in the British and colonial prison systems reveals the ideologies of governance peculiar to each colonial context. Colonial penal architecture manifested these differences. Whereas European prisons could be grouped according to three possible layouts—the rectangular form, based on older eighteenth-century jails and ecclesiastical buildings; circular forms including polygonal arrays; and the radial form, prevalent from the 1790s onward—colonial prisons ranged between lines of military barracks and clusters of pavilions.72 Although arguably more suited to a tropical climate, where the constant ventilation of buildings was desirable, the ultimate form of the colonial prison was shaped by a haphazard aggregate of various buildings and a lack of funds. While cellular penitentiaries were introduced in Egypt, Australia, Malta, Burma, Canada, and parts of India toward the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, experiments contemporaneous with those of Europe were considered failures.73 For the purpose of our argument and the period concerned, the distinctions between the colonial prison and its European counterpart were sufficient to illustrate the contest between Enlightenment ideals and colonial policy. Corporal punishment continued well into the nineteenth century in the colonies, with refractory cells as the only form

16

hidden hands and divided landscapes

of isolation reserved for political prisoners, escapees, or troublemakers. Isolation was achieved by transportation to a penal settlement, a discrete and contained geography that separated prisoners from their kinship groups and culture of origin. Moreover, isolation, achieved in this manner, had a dual outcome. Since prisoners did not have to be confined, they were available for labor. Considering the rural character of most colonial geographies and the projects of urbanism being embarked upon during this period, penal labor was an important asset. The lot of prisoners in the colonies might be likened to that of their counterparts in 1830s America, where a puritan work ethic and environmentalist values were imposed on a rural society.74 However, they differed in one important respect. In the Euro-American model, productive labor was abstracted through capitalist industry and its unproductive counterpart was used as a form of punishment.75 In the colonies, prisoners were an important source of productive extramural labor. In fact, they replaced slave labor, which had been recently abolished.76 Labor, largely defined through kinship systems in rural agrarian communities, was abstracted through coercion. Wherever the colonial prisoner-laborer was forced to contribute to the colonial economy, his or her mobility was of paramount importance. The characteristic that most distinguishes the colonial prison from its predecessors, however, is not its physical organization, its punitive regime, or its labor policy, although all three are affected by their colonial setting. The colonial prison was conceived and used for the exercise of power over a racially different population of prisoners. Enlightenment ideas of morality, reform, and self-discipline could not be translated successfully across this racial divide and there were few concerted efforts at introducing them. Self-regulation, reform through labor, and punishment were the operative mechanisms of the colonial penal system. More importantly, whereas the European prisoner was regarded as an individual who was denied an individual’s rights to freedom and property ownership, the colonial prisoner was identified as part of a collective, categorized by race. The orientalist stereotypes that divided colonial society in the city outside the prison walls operated, were experimented with, and were often institutionalized within the colonial prison. Considering the diversity of colonial regimes across several centuries and in varied geographical contexts, it is impossible to provide an accurate summary of the characteristics of the colonial prison. If the panopticon presented a universal ideal in a spatial template, then the colonial prison was its converse. There were as many variants to the type as there were colonial governments. As an institutional category the colonial prison ranged from the smallest holding cell in a local police station to the city jail or rural command. It varied physically from lines, barracks, or dormitories to penal complexes with workshops and

introduction

17

construction yards. Toward the turn of the century (from the nineteenth to the twentieth century) the prison took on many of the attributes of the cellular panopticon, modeled on Euro-American examples, but it invariably succumbed to the specific needs of the colonial project. As in the case of Singapore, a colonial prison in a particular geographic context could undergo all these transformations during its evolutionary timeline as an urban institution. It is far more appropriate therefore to learn how these physical environments embodied specific institutional policies that were fashioned for the management of race, and how colonial policies of race were formulated within prison walls.

Colonial Penal Policy Although similar instruments of secularization (to those in Europe) were indeed introduced to colonial subjects through colonial institutions, they were highly differentiated by both race and class. The assumption that ideas of modernity and liberalism, embodied in urban citizenship, were communicated effectively through the penal system is best critiqued through the failure or transformation of these models in the colonial penal landscape. We find that the emphasis in colonial examples typically shifted from the carceral space of the penitentiary to the docile (or political) and racially different body of the prisoner. In the colonies, penal policy was focused on the management of highly differentiated bodies through a hierarchic division of labor, which often reinforced caste or kinship asymmetries while abstracting labor for capitalist advancement. Discourses on reform and modes of incarceration disguised complex strategies for the governance of racially different subjects. Whereas in Europe, as argued by Michael Ignatief, the reformer’s critique was aimed at altering the criminal personality, colonial penal policy indiscriminately criminalized the collective.77 In Britain, the state acted as the moral agent for “environmentalist” criminology,78 intent on developing humane but disciplinary forms of punishment, whereas British colonies deployed rigorous labor regimes as a punitive strategy.79 Similarly, if we are to evaluate the colonial penal system against EuroAmerican models, there were significant deviations from the two dominant Euro-American systems—the separate system in a radial facility and the system of silent association with its cell blocks and workshops.80 In these models, we find that prisoners, although occupying separate cells at night, worked either in isolation or in silent congregation during the day. In short, correction through segregation remained their defining objective. In the colonies, both day and night were spent in congregation. Labor in both the American and European examples was largely repetitive and corrective, often due to a desire to protect the interests of free labor, whereas in the colonies, penal labor was introduced

18

hidden hands and divided landscapes

in direct competition with that of the settler community. The deviations between Euro-American and colonial models during the same century may be attributed therefore to economics rather than policy, both the expense of building panopticons and the high cost of free labor being determinants. While transportation provided a docile workforce, it had political advantages in usefully removing political agitators from potential sites of martyrdom. Since their sentences were governed by alien cultural norms, colonial felons undoubtedly saw transportation for labor as replacing enslavement. In order to fully understand the criteria governing racialized labor in the colonial prison, it is important to examine environments where race was not an issue, such as transportation to Australia.81 Although America was the main destination for British offenders when the Transportation Act was passed in 1718, the outbreak of the American Revolution soon turned them toward Australia.82 Compared with the convict hulks in British naval ports from which prisoners were sent out to “dredge harbors and rivers, build breakwaters and clean rust from chains and shot,” transportation to Bermuda, Gibraltar, or Australia may have been desirable.83 Previous representations of Australia’s convict system as being brutal and inefficient with the organization of forced labor differing significantly from that of free labor are challenged by Stephen Nicholas and Peter Shergold.84 They argue instead that convicts constituted an important form of human capital where their youth, sex, and health (largely healthy young males) proved to be an advantage to the colony.85 The authors debunk ideas of brutal and excessive punishment and poor living conditions, providing an alternative hypothesis of productive labor, where the high literacy rate (75 percent) and existing skill levels of the British working class were usefully applied for the colony’s advancement. Australia adopted cellular facilities contemporaneously with those in Europe, although labor continued to be productive. It is against this positive view of the convict experience that we need to analyze labor in Britain’s Asian colonies. Histories of transportation to penal colonies sit within a much broader body of scholarship on colonial prison systems, which include social histories of local prisoners, Europeans, and transportees. Colonial prisons reproduced many of the social divisions found in the colonial urban context. Through penal transportation, immigrant and criminal tensions were introduced into the already complex racial template of a colonial society. Additionally, the policies and the motives of colonial governments in penal colonies demonstrated the complex and often novel social system produced by the colonizing project. The case of the colonial prison is therefore critical for understanding issues of modernity, nationalism, and the operation of the colonial state during a specific period in history. We find that anticolonial resistance stormed its own Bastille during

introduction

19

prison riots. Political ideologies, revolutionary fraternities, and national imaginings often germinated within the walls of a colonial prison. The fears of the European residents, rather than the policies of administrators, ultimately shaped the colonial penal environment. The diversity of this site and its contradictions become glaringly evident in writings on the colonial prison.

Recent Histories of the Colonial Prison Scholarship on the subject of the colonial prison has grown exponentially following the works of several historians, and for the purpose of this study it is useful to categorize their work thematically. First, there are those who focus on the institution and institutional practice such as Salvatore and Aguirre on Latin America, Peter Zinoman on Vietnam, Frank Dikötter on China, and David Arnold on India, to name but a few.86 In their work, specific institutions or institutional policies are identified and studied as models for modernity and citizenship that the colonial project attempts to or fails to deliver. The diversity of the resultant interpretations is reflective of the colonial condition. In the case of Latin America, the panopticon was introduced following independence but continued to perpetuate racial and social hierarchies. Nascent political revolutionaries measured the failings of the French colonial state in Vietnam against the modern promise of the panopticon. In China, the custodial sentence superimposed penal models derived from the West onto traditional Chinese categories of crime and punishment. In India, the colonial prison was one of two sites where experiments in colonial medicine (recording disease and population) “colonized the bodies” of prisoners and soldiers. Caste identity provided both a divisive strategy and a resistant category, peculiar to the Indian prison. These studies differ from an earlier tradition because their sympathies lie with the penal population, often, as observed by Dikötter, paying scant attention to the victims of crime.87 A similar focus on penal subjectivity is evident in the second theme of the penal colony found in the work of Clare Anderson, Anand Yang, and Satadru Sen. They broaden the geographic scope of penal literature to include transportation of Indian convicts to Mauritius, the Andamans, Benkulen, and the Straits Settlements, respectively.88 Although penal colonies and colonial prisons feature prominently in their scholarship, they are theorized around wider issues of political isolation and displacement and focus on the consequent objectification of the prisoner’s body and his or her agency and resistance to colonial penal regimes. Penal practices such as messing, tattooing, clothing, and naming are described in detail in the work of Anderson, who strives while doing so to confer identity and agency to a nameless colonial category.89 In this manner, the Subaltern Studies

20

hidden hands and divided landscapes

approach is made explicit in scholarship on India, which focuses less on issues of citizenship embodied in European penal institutional practice and more on the strategies used to manage the unruly body of the prisoner. Focusing on the penal colony does not preclude institutional analyses, since, as demonstrated in the work of Michael Salman, republican institutions and plantation environments were replicated in penal colonies under American colonial rule in the Philippines.90 Examples of American institutional policy in the work of David Rothman and Michael Hindus may be regarded as precedents to this approach, where both the history of total institutions and the management of industrial and plantation labor in the United States are discussed in relation to political change.91 Similar interactions may be found in work on Australia in the tensions between colonists and emancipists, in a very different experience of colonization and settlement. As evident in the examples discussed so far, the view from social history has undoubtedly shaped our understanding of the colonial prison far more than that from anthropology, criminology, or architecture. The continuing vigor of this tradition is evident in a recent anthology by Frank Dikötter and Ian Brown titled Cultures of Confinement.92 The collection is organized by geography, as a comparative study of the regions of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The colonization of these geographies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries makes the examples used in the anthology highly relevant to a discussion of the colonial prison in Singapore. While similar studies of comparative regional material exist and have been mentioned above, this particular collection crosses many regions and focuses on cultural practices deriving from imprisonment, and therein lies its novelty and value. The approach from social history, moreover, allows us to understand the colonial prison in relation to specific social themes such as resistance, alternative cultures, anticolonial politics, and the customary order, which challenge the assumed universality of the modern prison and its redemptive power.93 In the argument of the authors, the resilience of such institutions is due to their emergence as social artifacts, which acquired a specific social and cultural dimension and were transformed by their different political and economic contexts rather than manifesting the prerogatives of a perfect institution. It is worth noting that many of the authors cited previously such as Salvatore and Aguirre, Anderson, and Arnold reappear in this collection. A final chapter by Anderson and Arnold titled “Envisioning the Prison,” which discusses the diversity of prison architecture and modes of representing prisoners, addresses some of the lacunae in previous work. A third and more peripheral theme is that of criminality, policing, and punishment, where the scholarship of Greg Bankoff on the Philippines, Walter E. J. Tips on Thailand, and several essays in Vicente Rafael’s anthology on “Figures

introduction

21

of Criminality” in Southeast Asia (including Salman’s described above) provide discussions on local crimes and offenses.94 Although there are many notable scholars who write on early twentieth-century policing, including Michael Dutton on China, for example, they lie for the moment outside the scope of this book.95 Whereas issues of reform raised in Europe and linked to ideas of scientific criminality invariably inform or contest the reception of colonial penal policy, policing is more likely to be connected with urban regulation and population control in the colonies. Holding spaces are typically local jails and district jails for debtors, petty offenders, and those awaiting trial. Histories on local criminality typically intersect with institutional histories in describing how the colonial prison is penetrated and eroded by a wider social context. The colonial prison is thus permeated in two directions by the pressure of external social relationships and the movement of labor beyond prison walls. The consequent porosity of the prison brings us to the final theme of penal labor, which freely intersects with all the previous penal conditions, particularly transportation. The punitive value of productive labor, the necessary mobility of the laboring prisoner (with the attendant risk of escape), and the graduation and classification of labor by race are replicated across colonial penal geographies in India, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, as evident in the histories of transportation mentioned above. In fact, dependence on labor regimes delayed the introduction of cellular penitentiaries in many colonial environments, including those in the Straits Settlements. The agricultural colony described by Salman was modeled on the plantation, while the urban prisons in many French and British examples were penal factories. Prison labor was closely tied to economic interests, which were either state-run, as in the prisons in Cairo under British rule, or run by private contractors, as in French Algeria, writes Anthony Gorman.96 But the most troubling narratives of labor are found in African prisons where, according to Florence Bernault, penal labor was patterned on slave labor and peasant resistance to labor constantly replenished the penal population.97 The most thorough investigations on penal labor illustrate the Australian case, where representations of convicts have shifted considerably over time from criminals and scoundrels to victims of an unjust system and ultimately to productive citizens of a healthy colony.98Across these various analyses, perceptions of penal labor shift from just punishment to unjust coercion and finally to a worthy route to citizenship, exposing the inconstancy of historical interpretation. In fact, emancipated convicts were given free grants of land, animals, and tools to encourage their settlement. As observed by John Braithwaite, “By the 1820s, the fourth decade after the first convicts arrived, ex convicts were masters of the majority of convicts on assignment, owned over half the wealth of the colony and three quarters of the land.”99

22

hidden hands and divided landscapes

The fact that a convict, Francis Greenway, became Sydney’s chief town planner has drawn convict labor narratives into mainstream architectural history.100 In fact, due to the number of penal sites in Australia, we might argue that prison architecture has had a fair share of attention, excellently documented in architectural histories and archeological studies such as Out of Sight Out of Mind.101 Critical analyses in academic and other publications; fiction, biographies, and cinematic productions; and frequent exhibitions and the conversion of penal facilities into public museums, followed most recently by the submission of a world heritage nomination for the conservation of Australian convict sites, link penal history and architectural scholarship.102 This robust tradition of scholarship is comparable to the work on European institutions by Thomas Markus and on penal architecture by Norman Johnston, but appears not to influence the work on Asia described above.103 There is scant interest in Southeast Asian penal sites, and their physical remains are unlikely to be preserved. The only example of architectural/heritage analysis is on Hanoi’s Hoa Lo prison, which resonates with the Vietnamese as a place of suffering during the colonial period, and with Americans as a place where American pilots were imprisoned during the Vietnam War.104 Describing the conversion of a portion of the former prison into a museum, following the corporate development of the site by a Vietnamese-Singaporean joint venture company, William Logan observes that the site has become sanitized and is no longer representative of the horror of the penal experience. A “bland version of prison life” that would not “offend the sensitivities of French, American or other Western visitors” is catered to instead.105 Similarly, in 2004, the site of Changi, the last colonial prison in Singapore, was subject to contesting claims from the Australian government (representing World War II veterans) and the Singapore government, which planned to develop the site into an expansive penal complex. What remains today is only a portion of the boundary wall. To many postcolonial populations, prisons are a troubling reminder of both colonial and subsequent World War II histories that are deliberately suppressed. Prisons in Singapore such as Bras Basah Jail, Pearl’s Hill prison, and Changi Jail have all been demolished, while the fate of Pudu Jail in Kuala Lumpur hangs in the balance.106 The city jails in Penang and Melaka (Bandar Hilir) remain intact, so far, because they are still operational. Apart from memoirs of political prisoners involved in nationalist struggles, Asian prisoners did not provide a comparable body of literature for analysis. They were largely illiterate and their descendants are eager to suppress and cast off their penal origins. Without architectural interest or involvement, the physical remains of colonial prisons are likely to disappear, taking their social histories with them.

introduction

23

The Prison in Singapore Colonial prisons in Singapore include nineteenth-century prisons such as Bras Basah Jail, Pearl’s Hill prison, the house of correction at Balestier Road, and the final twentieth-century prison at Changi. The latter, made notorious due to its internment of British, American, Australian, and other prisoners of war under the Japanese occupation of Singapore during World War II, is not the subject of this book, which confines itself to an overlap between the years of transportation, 1825–1867, and the history of the convict jail for transportees, 1860–1873. In short, this study addresses the years during which Singapore functioned as a penal colony and the prison, considered exemplary for its time, impacted the settlements’ urban development. This book responds directly to a major source on the Straits prison system, Prison Commissioner J. F. A. McNair’s book Prisoners Their Own Warders.107 Following his work, which extols the prison’s virtues, there have been two short social histories of the Straits penal system, written by Kernial Singh Sandhu and C. M. Turnbull.108 The objective of these scholars is to insert information on the social contribution of Indian transportees into a wider history of the settlement, which is dominated by analyses of late nineteenth-century indentured labor for plantations and coolie labor for construction work.109 Anderson and Yang have likewise used material on transportation to the Straits Settlements to frame specific arguments that give insights into the social world of convicts, within a larger framework of labor history.110 Their interest, influenced by Subaltern Studies, is in bringing personal narratives to the fore. There are few Indian Singaporeans who would value such an effort at reclaiming penal history. Penal associations are typically viewed as a stigma associated with poverty, a laboring class, and criminal behavior, which can be seen in the response by Samuel Dhoraisingam regarding the Jawi-Peranakan community from Melaka, which in his view “suffered perhaps from an inferiority complex because many of their members believed in the most obnoxious and ill-founded theory that they are the descendents of Indian convicts.”111 Dhoraisingam, who has acknowledged convict histories elsewhere, takes pains to establish a longer precolonial past for the Peranakan Indian community.112 Meanwhile, Elangovan, a local playwright, draws parallels between convict transportation and contemporary political imprisonment (in the Iraq War) in his recent dramatic production Transportation.113 In sharp contrast with such nuanced or personalized accounts of penal history, unpublished academic theses of Saw Chu-thong and Olivia Chua engage with the ongoing debate of reform versus punishment, in the institutional record, without adequately questioning its underlying motives and the accuracy of its representations.114 A familiar slogan advertising the Singapore Prisons Service in the twenty-first

24

hidden hands and divided landscapes

century, “Our mission in life is to get criminals out of prison,” read fleetingly on the rear of passing buses, expresses a similar juxtaposition of reformative zeal against a troubling record of corporal punishment, incarceration, and the death penalty.115 Their confinement to archival material available in Singapore has limited these previous accounts considerably. In this book, colonial records in the Public Records Office (National Archives), Kew; the Oriental and India Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Collections in London; and those in archives of sending colonies, in Malaysia, Singapore, and Ceylon, have usefully expanded the resources on this subject. A greater dependence on public works records and less so on prison commissions and penal reports marks a significant departure in the approach to the topic, grounding it in the discipline of architecture. Travel narratives, newspapers from the period, oral accounts of family histories, and physical remnants salvaged from penal sites have augmented these primary documents. Maps, building plans, photographs, and detailed descriptions of construction works have enlarged this previous history in an unprecedented manner, despite the paucity of local unofficial sources. Carefully annotated pictorial records provided in books by Gretchen Liu for Singapore and by Khoo Salma Nasution and Malcolm Wade for Penang, have been invaluable resources for this project.116 Undoubtedly, the focus on a period before Malay, Tamil, or Chinese language newspapers were first published has hampered this book’s objective of offering a more balanced view of history.117 Significantly, early Malay and Chinese sources pay scant attention to the presence of transportees. Local “subaltern” accounts of the presidency years are few and often inaccessible to researchers. This study depends instead on looking more critically at the colonial record and highlighting omissions and biases. In fact, comparative analyses on colonial penal sites have influenced it. Due to the extent and diversity of secondary sources on colonial prisons, this research has focused on comparisons with French and British colonial penal systems in Asia and Africa. If the criteria raised by the authors discussed above are applied to the case of Singapore, we find that although reform, particularly through labor, was discussed from the inception of the system, the Straits government did not adopt a cellular penitentiary until the 1870s. The dormitorytype penal models that were adopted in Singapore were not aimed at isolating or individuating prisoners spatially, excepting, we may argue, where they were separated from kith and kin by their sentence of transportation. Only Europeans, political prisoners, escapees, or rioters were kept in isolation in refractory cells within the Singapore prison. Ordinary criminals (with sentences of thieving, arson, assault, etc.) were rationalized and classified by individual sentences

introduction

25

and through a system of punishments and rewards, all of which were organized under a racialized division of labor. From a nineteenth-century perspective, transportation was a premodern system of punishment already superseded by the modern penitentiary. Racial identification, corporal punishment, and penal industry were related to an earlier period before the rationalization of the subject by law and within the nationstate. Divisions of race, class, caste, gender, and numerous social hierarchies were imposed upon the colonial penal population, identifying prisoners as collectives and precluding their treatment as rationalized objects of punishment. The best example of these retrogressive practices can be found in discussions on banditry and thuggee used to sentence groups of prisoners from India to the Straits.118 It can be surmised, however, that for these same reasons prisoners had greater agency within the Singapore prison system, particularly since prisoners were appointed as warders. The porosity of the prison walls, opportunities for marriage with female prisoners, and work for remuneration particularly as ticket of leave (TOL) convicts suggest a far more liberal interpretation of the punitive regime.119 In fact, the involvement of penal labor in many arenas of public life, from the construction of public buildings to artisan work, policing, and domestic service, raise questions regarding prisoner-agency recently posed by Yang—were they servants of the colonial state and unwitting instruments of its divisive policies?120 A history of the prison in Singapore cannot capture a specific institution or institutional practice as representative of colonial government in the Straits Settlements. In fact, the dialectic materialism that underwrites many of these previous examples is not evident in the Singapore case, due to laissez-faire and often transgressive colonial policies and the heterogeneity of the penal context and the penal system. Similarly, the history of the Singapore prison cannot be contained within any one definition of the penal condition. Just as the nature of colonial government and its centers of authority shifted throughout the nineteenth century, so did the prison(s), its location(s), penal policy, and the perception of prisoners by colonists. We can, however, record the history of the labor regime by which the penal population was governed and the deployment of race as its organizing principle. In short, the method by which a plural model of government imposed upon a captive population produced a political economy advantageous to an ambitious little colony can be plotted. Such ambitions were invariably cloaked in the rhetoric of reform arising from European penal policy. The resultant landscape was one so dynamic and complex and in fact so sensitive to the changes wrought by colonial policy that one can hardly hope to contain its history within the rationale of a book.

26

hidden hands and divided landscapes

The Shape of the Book As mentioned previously, due to the notions of plural citizenship examined in this research, it is imperative that the city and the prison be viewed as parallel projects. Together they reveal how the colonial-built environment enabled a range of divisive and discursive processes by which human beings were made into political subjects. While some of these practices were imposed or prescribed through official discourses, others were produced through resistant or alternative self-constructions as individuals or collectives. One of the challenges faced in shaping this book into a coherent narrative has been the necessity to move back and forth between two themes while maintaining a comprehensive timeline. The title, Divided Landscapes, which can be applied to studies of race, class, gender, colonial citizenship, and penal labor in addition to the implied physical landscape, has been particularly useful in binding these themes together. The title proposes that the two most important examples of colonial “subjectivity” arise in response to physical and spatial segregation in the colonial city and its prison. The colonial prerogatives for Singapore’s urban plan and the location of the prison within it are introduced in the next two chapters, which focus on divisive practices, in short, the physical and social imposition of the grid. We find that urbanism was a useful tool for applying the colonial cadastral project to land and to human populations. Chapter 2, “Divided Landscapes,” argues that its penal identity tarnished the reputation of the perfect colony and intersected with efforts at containing deviant activities (gambling, opium, and prostitution) in segregated urban neighborhoods. Although identified as a native pathology by orientalist narratives, the penal system and the opium trade underwrote the economic successes of colonial Singapore. Chapter 3, “The Colonial Prison,” explores the system of transportation to the Straits and how changes to the prison system, its labor regime, and its system of self-governance were quantified spatially and realized physically in an architecture that evolved with penal policy. The fluctuation of penal spatial configurations reflected changes in colonial administration, although the actual containment of prisoners occurred through abstraction and regulation. Divisive labor practices based on classification and categorization were introduced through the colonial penal system. Chapter 4, “Hidden Hands,” draws these two physical/spatial analyses together by discussing how the colonial urban plan was inscribed temporally by the activities of penal labor. By rewriting the city as a product of labor subjectivity and exploring the penal divisions that evolved to support it, this chapter demonstrates how ideas of race and colonial citizenship were tested in the prison system. The institutional models that emerged from this process are examined

introduction

27

in this chapter in terms of the relationship of each institution to a specific model of confinement and system of labor. Chapter 5, “The Perils of Association,” provides insights into the penal subculture using letters, petitions, and lawsuits as evidence. This chapter looks more closely at the circulation of material objects and artifacts used in penal manufacture and remarks on the resultant intersections with property and its associated civil status. Its focus is on individual histories that undermine colonial arguments of reformative labor. Chapter 6, “The Battle for the City,” traces the urban imagination of immigrant communities through an analysis of urban riots related to Muharram, a religious festival. This chapter suggests that the segregated city was challenged by its native occupants through direct and indirect insubordination. While these responses appeared to be neither political nor revolutionary, they were deliberately disruptive and involved convicts as well as Malay and Chinese secret societies. Chapter 7, “The Citadel,” describes the reactions of the colonial government to growing unrest and the hardening of colonial authority as it gained greater political autonomy from India. It surveys the institutions that were created to defend colonial authority against native populations. This chapter also describes the end of transportation. The nineteenth-century history closes with this chapter in a discussion of the urban defenses, the prison at Pearl’s Hill and the new Government House, thus reviewing the three arenas in which the colonial grid was initially imposed. The conclusion reflects on the implications of this history for understanding contemporary Singapore. It suggests that the definition of a plural society has undergone changes, evolving from a cultural model to a social one during the course of the twentieth century, and that these changes were in fact preempted in the colonial penal system. The chapter concludes that the persistence of race, labor, and citizenship as divisive categories in contemporary Singapore poses questions regarding previous interpretations of a plural society. This book ultimately hopes to reopen discussions of colonial urbanism in Southeast Asia as a study of competing technologies and processes. The metropolitan and indigenous subjectivities investigated in previous scholarship presage postcolonial citizenship practices, which are bridged by this research. The study of colonial penal industry shifts our focus from social and technical artifacts to colonial networks that operated within a nineteenth-century model of globalization. The mixed reception of the multiple forms of colonial government encountered across Southeast Asia reveal deficiencies in the production of knowledge and the gaps between intention and application. All these factors influence our analysis of Southeast Asian cities and more specifically Singapore as the site for the exemplary colonial prison.

28

hidden hands and divided landscapes

The replication of colonial historical patterns in contemporary Singapore evokes salient questions regarding the politics of the built environment and the discipline that seeks to represent it. By glorifying architects and institutions and ignoring the conditions and contribution of construction labor, contemporary practitioners and historians effectively condone a history of exploitation. Unfortunately, the archive is silent on personal histories, cemetery records, or private correspondence of prisoners, barring very few examples. Colonial reports, official correspondence, and travelers’ journals predominate. The resultant imbalance in source materials demonstrates the difficulties encountered in attributing agency to anonymous, impoverished, and marginal subjects. Moreover, due to the incompatibility of penal status and property ownership, the material culture of prisoners is unaccounted for. The politics of such exclusions indicates the necessity to further decolonize the disciplines of architecture and urbanism. Throughout this narrative, three racial categories—Europeans, “natives/ immigrants,” and Indian convicts—have been used consistently, positing European and Indian origin against regional nativity. In fact, although the use of the terms native/immigrant/ethnic communities is problematic, these definitions encompass a broader range of ethnic and dialect groups that are otherwise reduced by colonial plural categories. These categories, identified by Roland Braddell in 1934, are worth revisiting so that we might better understand their plural composition. Accordingly, “Europeans” consisted of “English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Americans, Belgians, Danes, Dutch, French, Germans, Greeks, Italians, Norwegians, Portuguese, Russians, Spaniards, Swedes, Swiss,” and others; whereas “Asiatics” could be categorized as Malays: “real Malays, Javanese, Boyanese, Achinese, Bataks, Banjarese, Bugis, Dyaks, and people from Menankabau Korinchi, Jambi, Palembang, and elsewhere.” Klings included “Tamils, Telugus and Malabaris,” “Bengalis,” including “Punjabis, Sikhs, Bengalis proper, Hindustanis, Pathans, Gujeratis, Rajputs, Mahrattas, Parsees, and even Burmese and Gurkhas,” Arabs, Sinhalese, Japanese, Annamites, Armenians, Filipinos, Oriental Jews, Persians, Siamese and other Asiatic races” who were minorities within this larger category, and the Chinese, “Hokkiens, Teo-chius, Khes, Hok-Chias, Cantonese, Hailams, Hok-Chius, and Kwong-Sais” who were in the majority.121 Although such an inventory is meaningless without an understanding of the relative proportions of the various groups, it may serve to impress upon us the cultural flexibility demanded of and possibly demonstrated by settlers. As observed by Lai Chee Kien, “[t]he convergence of denominations and dialects into larger racial groups was an attempt to map the multifarious communities,

introduction

29

Figure 1. Coleman survey disturbed by tiger, 1831 (Grace Paramaspry, Jazminasianarts, Singapore).

and to create a form of surveillance and control by British administrators” that “discounted the dynamic nature of multi-racial communities.”122 Although reducing racial/dialect groups to collectives is problematic and is compounded by the paucity of non-elite histories, it is the tensions between cultural groups identified through CMIO labels, and the administrative categories tailored for Europeans, immigrants, and natives, that provide us with resources for our analysis of the period. Indeed, the colonial prison and its penal population are located at this very point of tension and erasure. Similarly, early town plans of Singapore echo such social/historical absences by omitting the physical imprint of the colonial prison, intending perhaps to prevent mischief makers from abusing such knowledge. The greater task of this book, therefore, while asserting the prison’s centrality in Singapore’s urban history and in its larger colonial political context, is to make it physically and materially legible.

CHAPTER 2

Divided Landscapes

From the 1950s onward, in fact until it was claimed for the new Singapore Management University (SMU) in 2002, Bras Basah Park was an urban void at the heart of the densely developed civic district in Singapore. Its appearance as a planned public space flanked by the public library and two museums was deceptive. The site marked the extent of a much larger colonial institution, since demolished, that was situated at the rear of the European town during the colonial period. Two Chinese names for Bras Basah Road, which is adjacent to the park, Lau Khaku Keng Kau (mouth of the old jail) and Ken Kau (ankle chains), identified that institution as the colonial prison.1 It was a prison so extensive that it occupied three blocks in the colonial grid, a space larger than that provided for Singapore’s commercial square. Words from Hindi such as hargari (handcuffs) and kanjaus (punishment cells), which have been absorbed into the Malay language, suggest the Indian origins of the penal system.2 Oral accounts ascribe the Malay term Kling or Keling, said to refer to Indians from Kalinga, to the sound of ankle chains and identify the penal population as having been largely of Indian origin.3 Indeed, Singapore and the Straits Settlements were the nineteenth-century penal destinations for more than twenty thousand prisoners from the South Asian colonies of the British Empire.4 These telling associations embedded in language and place names suggest that the colonial prison, despite its confinement in European space, had once permeated the other cultures of its plural society, its Chinese and Malay communities, which were located outside the town grid. Provoked by impending changes to the Bras Basah site, the Singapore History Museum and the National University launched a six-day archeological excavation in 2001, hoping to unearth relics of a precolonial fourteenth-century civilization.5 Amidst the debris discarded during the dig were fragments of building materials from the nineteenth-century colonial prison. 30

divided landscapes

31

The debris from the colonial prison gives rise to a series of questions, which we will return to during the course of this book. A foundation, up to 1.63 meters (5.3 feet) below the surface, revealed eleven tiers of brickwork (foundation bricks, structural bricks, and decorative bricks), which were laid following the English bond. Training in European methods was evident. However, swirling patterns in the burnt clay and inconsistencies in compaction proved that the bricks were handmade and therefore from an era before mechanization, when brick making was labor-intensive. The number 1853 was etched along the short side of a brick. Bricks were also marked with an I-shaped longitudinal indentation, to prevent shearing, and a crudely scoured crow’s foot, marking them as government issue. Additionally, a wealth of clay floor tiles, roof tiles, pieces of screed and plaster, as well as ornamental and crescent-shaped column bricks and parts of clay water pipes, suggested a range of materials quite different from the timber and attap6 of Malay fisher folk, the smaller sized bricks made by Chinese brick makers,7 or the ancient brick constructions on Bukit Larangan.8 Layers of bitumen beneath pieces of plinth foundation protected the structures from the damp of the surrounding marsh, while materials were adapted to the tropical climate. The coupling of rationalized European methods and a scientific adaptation to climate with labor-intensive practices is symptomatic of colonial rule in Southeast Asia, where tight budgets, immigrant or coerced labor, and pedagogical instincts combined to produce various permutations of nineteenth-century architecture. Urban plans and institutions were ideal devices for cultural colonization, and the introduction of robust materials and technologies marked a shift to a more permanent architecture, capable of expressing colonial authority. The durability of the bricks, tiles, and plaster work, which were employed in the prison for confining “dangerous offenders,” was equally useful for establishing urban public institutions. Functional forms adorned with elaborate ornamentation vied for London’s attention in competition with Britain’s other Indian colonies, and various parts of the scanty administration were corralled into achieving this end. Singapore’s Public Works Department was combined with the Convict Department and was superintended by the same colonial engineers.9 The history of the prison at Bras Basah intersects in this manner with an important narrative of the island’s nineteenth-century construction industry and public architecture. Indeed, the absent prison can be framed by the institutional histories that surround its former site, in buildings that were produced by convict labor. St. Andrews Cathedral, the premier Protestant cathedral for Singapore, acknowledges this contribution with a plaque stating, “The present cathedral was built in English Gothic style, between 1856 and 1864 using Indian convict labour.” Government House, Istana, the Singapore president’s official residence, has a small timber guardian figure, buried on the site by convict laborers, on

32

hidden hands and divided landscapes

Figure 2. Fragments of construction materials excavated from Bras Basah Park site in 2001/2002 (drawn by author; photograph, author, 2002).

divided landscapes

33

display on the landing of its grand staircase. The government offices at Empress Place, now the central portion of the Asian Civilizations Museum (new wing), the battlements at Fort Canning to the rear of the site, and the roads, drains, and bridges that surround it are all linked to this largely unacknowledged history. These exemplary works are instead used to illustrate the achievements of colonial rule and the creation of the perfect colony. The urban void at Bras Basah that has since been occupied by a different institution and institutional history opens up a broader debate on exclusions and appropriations. The historiography of colonial Singapore is overwhelmingly focused on its economic successes. Indeed, Singapore’s nationalist self-construction after independence followed a similar trajectory, turning its back on history altogether while perpetuating the legacies of colonial institutions. Singapore’s plural society continued the colonial sociopolitical structure of Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Other (Eurasian), albeit with the majority Chinese in government.10 Europeans and Eurasians who had once shaped these institutions were relegated to the least of the communal categories and decolonized into the metaphorical “other.” Or, one might argue, the European cultural template was expanded across the entire national polity and the European race became a minority ethnic category within it. Colonial history, the accounts of colonial elites, administrators, and their official records continued to dominate and influence our understanding of Singapore’s past. In fact, the role of one such administrator, Stamford Raffles, was exaggerated despite the very short duration of his time in the colony, establishing a precedent whereby authoritative individuals could effect tremendous social change.11 In fact, until the late 1990s, when excavations at Fort Canning, Empress Place, and the Parliament House area revealed quantities of fourteenthcentury artifacts, the narrative of colonial discovery persisted. As observed by Chong Guan, recent efforts in archaeology hope to go beyond the intentions of Raffles and explore the longer precolonial past in a shift to “a more ‘Asia-centric’ view” of Singapore’s history.12 According to the unilateral construction of history, Singapore exemplifies an enlightened and progressive brand of colonialism executed by British administrators (see Appendix B). Indeed, progress, framed in this manner, usefully advances a specific hierarchy of plurality. As displayed on the frieze on the Supreme Court building (1939), the overall perception is of benign settlement with colonial architects instructing Chinese construction workers.13 This acknowledged division of labor between European and immigrant communities persists into the postcolonial period, structuring race and class relations. Whereas labor histories that intersect with histories of immigrant communities, particularly of Chinese labor, have made significant inroads into the national narrative, scrutinizing, critiquing, and sometimes reproducing colonial stereotypes, the history

34

hidden hands and divided landscapes

of penal labor, a potentially disturbing and disruptive thread, has been neglected or suppressed. This chapter investigates the motivations behind specific plural political divisions, inscribed on the colonial landscape of the Straits Settlements, as providing the rationale for racial segregation within the colonial penal system. Evidence from colonial records and subsequent interpretations of the plural society weigh heavily on this history due to their conviction that colonial intentions were realized in the perfection of Singapore’s urban landscape. This research differs, however, in its interpretation of the ends to which colonial urbanism was applied. Although the term “divided landscape” suggests duality and links this term to the historiography on colonial dual cities, the environments described in this chapter are, due to their diversity, not dialectical. They do not conform to the urban models observed in India and other colonies described in the introduction. By using the broad term of a dialogic landscape in describing the colonial physical and social context of the Straits, this chapter concurs with Folch-Serra that landscapes, whether physical or relational, are places “where social, historical, and geographical conditions allow different voices to express themselves.”14

The Straits Settlements Recent scholarship on the settlement of early Singapore cites three sources as evidence. The Serajah Melayu, a “mythicized history,” records the rule of five kings dating from the arrival of Sri Tri Buana in Temasek (Singapore) in 1299 to its abandonment for Melaka in 1511.15 Although written in the colonial period, the evidence of royal graves on Bukit Larangan (Fort Canning Hill) suggests that this narrative is well-founded. The second source, the memoirs of Chinese traveler Wang Dayuan, is based on his 1349 account of travels in the South Seas.16 He describes piracy, agriculture, trade with China, a city wall, and, more significantly, the fact that the Chinese and natives live side by side. In fact, as argued by Murfett et al., Chinese settlement in the region during the twelfth century broke the local trade monopolies and fostered the development of an urban-rural dichotomy.17 The third source, the Desawarnana, a Javanese fourteenth-century court poem, lists Temasek as subject to the Javanese Majapahit kingdom.18 Other Portuguese, Javanese, and Siamese accounts corroborate these details.19 As observed by Murfett et al., although the early history of the British occupation of Singapore and the name of Raffles stand for the inauguration of Singapore history, “[a] completely indigenous Singapore, comprising a cosmopolitan trading population, did exist and prosper here much earlier, owing nothing to external influence.”20 The colonial encounter in Singapore, as in many settlement colonies, advanced through the erasure of this indigenous history tenuously coupled with

divided landscapes

35

orientalist accounts of a lost civilization. Colonial scholars typically recorded cultural artifacts and practices, least threatening to the colonial administration, and the colonial encounter was underwritten by various forms of epistemic violence and neglect. On reflection, the contemporary archeological excavations by the Singapore History Museum can be seen as rescuing this earlier precolonial history against the authority of the colonial narrative. As stated by Kwa Chong Guan, Raffles recorded some of the “Malay” “antiquities” seen upon his arrival, such as an earthen rampart running along the banks of what is now the Stamford Canal and the tombs of Malay kings on Bukit Larangan.21 In 1822 John Crawford recorded these tombs as well as brick platforms and sandstone pillar bases, and he estimated the rampart to be 4.8 meters (15.75 feet) broad and 2.7 meters (8.8 feet) high.22 He also saw the Singapore Stone, a 3 x 3-meter (9.8 feet) sandstone boulder split in two with inscriptions on its surface. But the investigation went no further. In 1843, Captain Stevenson (settlement engineer) blew up the Singapore Stone to facilitate passage at the river mouth, the progress of trade being paramount.23 The history of Temasek noted in Malay annals and Chinese travel narratives was regarded as too fragmentary to be noteworthy until 1969, and scholars such as K. G. Tregonning and C. M. Turnbull typically dated their histories of modern Singapore from the British colonial encounter.24 New forms of social modernity, endorsed by colonial economic development, were the focus of the scholarship that followed. This notion that the infrastructure and institutions of British colonialism brokered forms of modernity is central to the reception of the colonial prison and is the underlying theme of this chapter. Undoubtedly, the settlements were progressive economic and political ventures. The British East India Company had annexed the Straits Settlements of Penang, Singapore, and Melaka in 1786, 1819, and 1825, respectively, following the shift of regional power in Southeast Asia from Dutch to British hands.25 In 1826 they were collectively designated as an Indian presidency. However, the monopoly of the company was under threat. Free competition replaced mercantile capitalism under the East India Company, carving avenues for private enterprise and secularization. Turnbull, writing on the history of this period, observed that whereas the policies of the East India Company in India included commercial monopoly, restricted immigration, and closed bureaucracy, the Straits Settlements had free trade, light taxation, and laissez-faire government and so were its most “incongruous offspring.”26 Adam Smith, one of the most influential thinkers of the eighteenth century, referred to this economic predisposition as the “hidden hand of capital,” an important attribute of the new industrial economy.27 Smith firmly believed that society would likewise adjust to an appropriate moral value system and social order. He objected to colonization based on the commercial monopolies of exclusive

36

hidden hands and divided landscapes

companies, which in his opinion contrived to stunt the natural growth of a new colony.28 Smith’s theories of self-regulation were promoted as an important attribute of the Enlightenment and his book on the wealth of nations was among the regular fare prescribed for officials posted to the colonies.29 Due to several factors, the Straits Settlements differed radically from Britain’s Indian presidencies. Because the annexation of the settlements followed peaceful monetary exchanges between the British and Malay chieftains, British authority in the region was limited. Politically, the settlements were on the periphery of the Calcutta-centered colonial administration and were neglected because the freedom of their ports severely curtailed the revenue accruable to the East India Company. They were dependent on attracting large groups of regional settlers, who were free to travel across the settlements’ borders. In fact, in comparison with the Indian subcontinent, all three of the Straits Settlements promised regional migrants greater rights to self-determination. But such freedoms, operating under colonial rule, required careful management through covert strategies that would maintain racial hierarchies and ensure British authority. The colonial solution was a divided urban landscape where migrant communities would remain segregated. In the Straits cities, experiments with racial segregation, applied over time, ultimately produced a spatial template for a plural society, a system of citizenship for those territories that were precariously placed between colonies and dominions. By Furnivall’s definition, in the colonial plural society, “different sections of the community live side by side, but separately, within the same political unit.”30 Identified by their religious and cultural practices, each of these distinct communities encountered the others in the marketplace. Colonial laws categorized them according to race and organized them hierarchically according to the functions they performed within the colonial economy. In short, a race-based propensity for a particular form of work was simultaneously identified and classified by the Straits administration.31 Colonial representations of the “native populations” around this division of labor equally produced a range of racial prejudices by labeling the Chinese community as industrious but degenerate, the Malay community as courageous but lazy, and the Indian community as dirty and a laboring class, loyal to the government.32 Writing on this early period, scholars assume, far too easily, that language, ethnic occupational specialty, custom, and religion separated the groups quite naturally, precluding any need for a “divide and rule” policy.33 Descriptions of colonial Singapore corroborate such assumptions by reproducing plural racial divisions in its urban landscape. Accordingly, Chinese, Malays, and Indians resided in separate and spatially distinct ethnic neighborhoods outside Singapore’s European town. Although many different racial and language groups were contained within these larger categories and

divided landscapes

37

shared both residential and public space, they were reduced to racial stereotypes better suited to the colonial economy. In fact, the European town was placed so as to physically divide the natives and settlers from neighboring geographies from new immigrants. Although the Malaysian Straits Settlements, the settlements on the hinterland, had a plural society dating from the same period as Singapore, with the same racial mix, a much longer history of migration led to a very different outcome. The population of the sultanate of sixteenth-century Melaka, prior to colonization, was made up of numerous regional ethnicities including Chinese and Indians. Following their colonization, ethnic groups in Penang and Melaka were not segregated to the extent they were in Singapore, and they resided in adjacent kampungs or streets where racial and territorial boundaries were often blurred. Hybrid communities such as Malay-Chinese Babas, Peranakan-Indians, and Eurasians of Portuguese descent were already in place, the former two from the precolonial period. The British dual system of government reinforced ethnic divisions that excluded such hybrid categories.34 In a setting where the adjacent hinterland was predominantly Malay, it was the Malay that was objectified under British rule when, as observed by Barbara and Leonard Andaya, numerous negative characteristics were attributed to them in comparison with other races. Predominant among the associations used to damn the Malays was the industriousness of the Chinese, whose rate of migration and settlement was considered a reliable index of economic progress.35 Indians who were largely brought to labor in the plantations were colored by that association and, excepting a few trading minorities, were relegated an inferior position. The Melayu (the Malay) were eventually classified by a broad definition of race, language, and Islamic persuasion, which absorbed any regional identities and served to extend the boundaries of the “Malay” racial category after independence. The term “divided landscapes” as it is applied to the Straits context can therefore suggest divisive strategies enacted at different scales, beyond physical urban duality. There was a complex graduation of color, status, and relationship to colonial authority between the predominant racial groups, and racial categories were blurred by minorities, regional migrants, and hybrid identities originating from the precolonial period. The colonial government’s desire to organize race into coherent categories comes therefore from two different motivations: economically, to establish a race-based division of labor that could be quantified in terms of the profitability of the settlement; and politically, to prevent the different races combining for anticolonial resistance. More importantly, racial segregation became necessary to prevent the blurring of the different cares and conditions by which the colonial government’s relationship to each racial group

38

hidden hands and divided landscapes

had been negotiated. Accordingly, while the Europeans remained a privileged minority and the transportees were convicted by Indian laws, the Indian, Chinese, and Malay immigrants were free settlers with comparative autonomy and systems of self-governance. Turnbull notes that in 1852 legislation was passed permitting the naturalization of Chinese settlers, although after 1857 it was confined to Straits-born Chinese and their children.36 Moreover, until 1860—before emigration from China was legalized—the Chinese immigrants were returning at great risk. Wealthy individuals from various communities who were proprietors of land or house property with a permanent residence in the Straits could, once cleared by the police, be heard by the executive council and be issued a certificate of naturalization for a small fee ($25). They would forfeit their rights in their homeland (there would be no protection if they should return there) and cease to be immigrants.37 Because these were the legal conditions under which immigrants were claimed by the colony, the majority of the settlers were not interested in British citizenship. It appears that a different system of entitlements and privileges was meted out to each of the different racial groups and legislated by colonial laws, an arrangement Aihwa Ong has described as “graduated sovereignty.”38 Similarly, Malay loyalties were to chieftains on the adjacent mainland, whereas the Chinese who were relatively distant from China focused on clan loyalties. As early as 1822, a general meeting of Indian inhabitants in Singapore led to the appointment of Sangara Chetty as the leader of all Indians in a council composed of Narainna Pillai, Mohamed Hassan, and Mohamed Lebar as the chiefs of coast natives, “Musselmans,” and laborers, respectively.39 They were appointed to settle disputes among the Indian community and are evidence of its heterogeneity. Indian sepoys and convicts were governed by different laws from those governing Indian settlers. The plural society that was thus defined by its political and socioeconomic structure demanded varying degrees of loyalty to the colonial state and was deliberately shaped and managed through its urban plan.

The Urban Plan “Sedentarization,” argues James Scott, was a key ingredient in the civilizing process, and Southeast Asian societies that were land rich but lacking in manpower tried by various means to attract peripheral populations to the center.40 The colonial cadastral survey, perhaps the most effective device for making lands and populations visible, materialized this desire as part of a tax regime tied to individual property ownership.41 It also changed the perception of two elements critical for defining Southeast Asian settlements, the river and the ocean, from

divided landscapes

39

economic conduits to political and cultural boundaries, dividing native and European settlements. Although this was not the case in the dual cities of Bombay or Calcutta, it was the case in Melaka and Singapore. The work of Barbara Andaya and Carl Trocki has provided us with a detailed discussion of the significance of the riverine system in mainland Malay society, for Perak and Johor respectively.42 Andaya writes how Perak’s rulers lacked the confidence to reside at the river mouth, thus controlling trade and tying the geography to the central government, and so resorted to a treaty with the Dutch. Trocki, in an analysis of surat sungai, river letters that licensed the Chinese to open up a river valley for pepper and gambier plantations, describes the kangchu system and the initial settlements of Chinese in Johor. Each settlement was owned and organized by a kongsi (association) comprising a kangchu (captain), the planters, and a shopkeeper from Singapore or Johore Bahru.43 Similarly, Johannes Widodo demonstrates how the location of the Chinese camp in the riverine settlements of entrepot economies produced a model of urbanism that pre-empted the plural urban plan to some extent.44 The native settlement, Chinese camp, and European fort were distinct spatial entities, linked by the river. Stephen Dobbs, writing on the Singapore River, argues that Raffles in his original plan for Singapore, although using the river as a dividing line between European and native towns on the north and south banks, respectively, emphasized its importance as the commercial lifeline of the settlement.45 The European town was additionally flanked by a zone for government placed opportunistically along the riverbank, where the full scope of authority could be visualized. In fact, Raffles intended to reproduce the dual city in every respect but for two anomalies: the Temmengong’s compound was in the center of government property and a spot on the south bank at the mouth of the river was reserved for public purposes.46 As described in great detail by Dobbs, this plan was not feasible due to extensive flooding on the south bank and limited funds for landfill, which provoked initial settlement in the government zone. The conflict between Raffles and William Farquhar on the latter’s inability to reproduce this plan is well-recorded. Dobbs notes that Raffles “publicly castigated Farquhar and privately revised his plan” and that the separation of native and European communities (now gathered together on the north bank) was integral to it.47 A commission appointed to investigate the issue found that it could only be implemented following extensive filling to the south bank, and a new proposal was drawn up in 1822. The riverfront was zoned to allow government, European merchants, the Chinese, and the Chulias (Muslim Indian laborers and lightermen) access to the river. In short, while recognizing the significance of river and port for the economic advancement of the colony, the new plan

40

hidden hands and divided landscapes

produced the spatial template for Furnivall’s definition of a plural society. Ethnic and occupational groups were contained within demarcated allotments and the river provided a conduit for commerce. Although in this respect the river served the same function as it had in precolonial settlements, it was also a boundary separating European and native—ruler and ruled. The decision to implement Raffles’ revised plan of 1822 provides the opening for our introduction to convict history. The filling of the marshland on the south bank was achieved at considerable expense. The river, surrounded though it was by marshland, was critical to commerce, and so landfill was essential. Another inexpensive source of labor was necessary if the settlement was to develop its infrastructure, and the introduction of convict labor in 1825 would fulfill this need. As noted by Dobbs, the first dredge boat to be used on the river was crewed by Indian convicts who were employed on many subsequent dredges.48 Convict sweepers would dump town refuse in this area and cover it with brushwood and dirt. “Long lines of convicts engaged in reclamation work along the river could be heard singing as they daily made their way through town with bundles of brushwood and baskets of dirt balanced on their heads,” writes Dobbs.49 If the Straits government, with the aid of convict labor, was designing a city for a plural society, how were these racially distinct spaces differentiated from one another? What was the setting for that novel institution—the colonial prison? We need to understand the colonial urban plan as it evolved in a sequence of interventions across the three settlements of Melaka, Penang, and Singapore.

The Three Settlements The changing policies of British colonial governance in the Straits were manifested in the urban organization of the three Straits Settlements as they evolved over time, with Melaka (Malacca), the former Dutch territory, which was transferred to the East India Company in 1824, offering us an example of a colonial city from the early period of European colonization. The city predated colonial rule as a thriving Malay sultanate with its own urban culture and multiracial population. The success of Melaka during the precolonial period was due to measures that fostered international trade, including safe sea lanes, warehouses, and an efficient legal and administrative machinery, but above all its response to its growing trading community. Four syabandars (harbor masters) represented the different ethnic communities, oversaw their affairs, managed the marketplace and warehouse, checked weights, measures, and coinage, and adjudicated disputes.50 The four groups were (1) Gujaratis, (2) South Indians, Bengalis, and traders from Pegu (in Burma) and Pasai, (3) those from Java, Maluku, Banda, Palembang, Borneo, and the Philippines, and (4) those from Champa (central

divided landscapes

41

Vietnam), China, and the Ryukyu Islands (probably including Japanese). Their identities appeared to be regional rather than racial.51 The precolonial settlement was on either side of the Melaka River, with the sultan’s palace and compound located downstream (Hilir) on its south bank. The north bank was inhabited by diverse groups of Javanese, Gujaratis, Arabs, and Malays. There were Malay kampungs (villages) and those of the Orang Laut (Sea Gypsies) surrounding the palace, and the market occupied the bridge across the river.52 However, Melaka’s subsequent encounters with European colonizers (the Portuguese from 1511 to 1641 and the Dutch from 1641 to 1824) forced its segregation into two spatial enclaves: a fortified European town on the south bank and a native settlement on the north bank, divided by the Melaka River. The church of St. Paul at the top of the hill had previously housed the Malay sultan’s palace and had been used by both the Portuguese and the Dutch for their church. The British used the church as a powder magazine and later added the residency, a sign of secular colonial government, beside it atop St. Paul’s Hill. In short, the military and the clergy were attached to the early colonial enterprise. The native town (Upeh) on the low land across the Melaka River was an agglomeration of kampungs that housed various regional communities. The cohabitation of diverse Asian ethnic groups and the scarcity of women had provided a fertile ground for liaisons between Chinese, Indians, and Malays, and it nurtured a new and affluent ethnic group termed Peranakan (i.e., Straits-born). Melaka had developed culturally as a Peranakan city with a small, tightly wound urban center of mixed ethnicity that unraveled spatially into numerous affiliated Malay villages. By 1510 it had a polyglot population of around forty or fifty thousand, of whom a thousand were wealthy Gujaratis and three thousand were Indian merchants, including Parsees, Bengalis, Tamils, and Malayalees.53 Peranakan Indians or Chittys, who were Tamil Saivites, intermarried with both Chinese and Malay communities and severed their relationship with India.54 Malay chieftains would later use these hybrid ethnic lineages with their commercial interests and rural connections to destabilize the British administration.55 By the early nineteenth century, maps of Melaka identify a series of kampung communities within the native town, such as Kampung China (Chinese), Kampung Kling (Indian), Kampung Pali, Kampung Serani (Eurasian), and Kampung Belanda (Dutch).56 Evidently, by the nineteenth century various ethnic groups, including the former European communities, cohabited with each other in the native part of town. Although the kampung-based spatial geography adopted by Melaka residents had rural origins, it is important to understand that it did not necessarily replicate village architecture. Like its population, Melaka’s architecture was a hybrid of urban and rural house forms, and its configuration was likewise shaped by

42

hidden hands and divided landscapes

new enterprise. Compared with the medieval fortress, which housed colonial government, Melaka’s native community occupied a modern, cosmopolitan space, no doubt enabled by the introduction of laterite and brick construction by the Dutch and the Portuguese. Moreover, because of its well-assimilated communities and its location within the Malayan mainland, Melaka was unavailable for cultural reorganization by its European administration. Although trade had been the defining factor of its economy in previous centuries, the dominance of Penang on the same eastern coast had caused Melaka’s gradual reversion to a rural and mining economy. These changes in the economy had led to the dispersal of its population during the late eighteenth century, and by the mid-nineteenth century Melaka proved to be the most difficult territory to divide and rule. It was accordingly neglected by the Straits administration. British rule on Penang Island, the smallest of the settlements with the largest population, contrasted significantly with that in Melaka and had a greater geographic autonomy. Named Prince of Wales Island after George the IV, Penang was linked to Province Wellesley, a narrow strip of land on the mainland. When Francis Light arrived in 1786, he found that a group of five hundred Chinese from Kedah had established a main street on the northeastern part of the island (since 1773). Light incorporated this migrant settlement into George Town (Georgetown), the colonial city, which consequently took on a predominantly Chinese identity with the main street (Tua Kay, now China Street) acting as the central east-west axis of the urban street system.57 Light initially marked out the north shore for the cantonment and the public buildings, Fort Cornwallis and the Government House, both of which were later reinforced using convict labor. George Town hugged the northeastern shore of the island, with the British residents and immigrant communities packed together in a tight orthogonal gridiron of streets laid out by Light in 1794. Light Street contained the city on its northern public edge, Beach Street on its eastern coastal edge, and Chulia Street and Pitt Street on its southern and western inland boundaries.58 Penang emerged as an eastern presidency with Singapore and Melaka under its control between 1826 and 1830, when, due to increasingly heavy expenditure, the presidency was abolished. The three settlements functioned as an East India Company residency, with Penang at its head from 1830 to 1832, after which the capital of the administration was transferred to Singapore, where it stayed until 1867.59 Light was able to use the urban grid to organize the diverse settlers according to ethnicity and along streets. In short (unlike in Malay kampungs), the divisions between blocks, rather than the lots themselves, became the criteria for identifying space. The boundary became synonymous with both public space and identity and the transition from private to public was more abrupt. Semipublic spaces, usually related to community space, had to be carved out deep inside the

divided landscapes

43

rectangular building mass as private, even secretive, urban courtyards. Native space, moreover, was not separated by geographic features. Europeans occupied the northern part of the grid and shoreline, while migrants from regional geographies were allocated adjacent streets named after their ethnicity or place of origin, such as Armenian Street, Chulia Street, and Acheen Street. Because the Calcutta-centered colonial government was less supportive of Light’s endeavors, the plan of the city reflected an economy contingent on the cooperation of the non-European traders. Proximity and ethnic identity likewise shaped migrant efforts at self-determination. Although initially the grid was effective in controlling and categorizing the subject population, the adjacency and conflation of native and European residential space would soon collapse its divisions. The Jawi-Peranakan community, a hybrid ethnicity of Muslim Indians and Malays, flourished in Penang, as did their Chinese-Peranakan counterparts.60 Moreover, these various communities combined across racial lines in periodic feuding against territorial rivals. This was not the case in Singapore. Singapore, when annexed for the British in 1819 by Stamford Raffles, the lieutenant governor of Benkulen, was the last of the settlements to be colonized, and it learned from these two previous experiments in urbanization. Immediately prior to Raffles’ arrival, the settlement had housed a couple of Malay fishing villages, the villages of the Orang Laut, described as around one hundred small houses and thirty families in boats, and a few Chinese settlers.61 The Malay Temenggong, Abdul Rahman, was persuaded to permit British settlement in exchange for an annual fee of five hundred Spanish dollars.62 As for the other inhabitants, a letter from Resident Farquhar in 1822 states that twenty or so plantations owned by Chinese and Malays may have commenced prior to the formation of the British establishment.63 Documents (dated the same year) for the sale to Englishmen of gambier plantations established before the English settlement—by Tan Ngun Ha, Tan Ah Lo, and Heng Toaan—corroborate this evidence. Once these lands were acquired, Singapore presented a tabula rasa for urban and demographic experimentation, and the remains of the city walls, graves, brick plinths, and the Singapore Stone were overwritten by a different cultural authority. In his new urban plan, Raffles added the commercial square to the by now familiar symbols of liberal government—the urban grid and the governor’s residence. The residency or Government House, which symbolized secular government, was built on Bukit Larangan (the Forbidden Hill) soon after the annexation of Singapore. The reinscription of the site where the fourteenth-century palace of Temasek was believed to have existed communicated the transfer of political power.64 Although built of timber and attap, the original 1822 building by G. D. Coleman reflected the perfect symmetry of classical proportions: it

Figure 3. Comparative study of urban fabric in the three Straits Settlements, showing the distinctive urban evolution of Melaka, Penang, and Singapore (drawn by author).

divided landscapes

45

was “one hundred feet front and fifty deep.”65 Reconstructed in 1826 in a “NeoClassical manner,” with brick and stucco pediments and a colonnaded classical portico, the elevated location of the Government House offered panoptic views of Singapore town. There are two developments that occurred during the early period that are worth noting because they consolidated the plural ethnic divisions in the colony. The first was the removal of natives of the “lower classes” onto swamplands further north and south, which Raffles achieved by auctioning land for amounts as high as $1,200 or $1,150.66 Thus, just as in other comparable colonial settlements throughout Asia and Africa, class distinctions produced a de facto system of racial segregation, and the high ground was “set apart exclusively for the accommodation of Europeans and other principal settlers.”67 The second development was the gradual marginalization of the Malays. The Temenggong, who lived inconveniently in the government zone, was encouraged to move to Telok Belanga,68 writes Abdullah, through a strategy he describes as “putting bananas into a man’s mouth while sticking thorns in his back.”69 Friction between the Temmengong’s men and migrants from Melaka was cited as the reason.70 Raffles followed it, moreover, by directing the East India Company’s convicts to clear the adjacent Malay graveyard and to throw the dead men’s bones into the sea. Meanwhile the site selected for Tengku Long’s palace (the Sultan Husain Shah of Singapore) was further north beyond the European town, near the Bugis settlement, thus dividing the groups of Malays and the Malays from the Chinese.71 Murfett et al. observe, “On the side of civil administration, Singapore continued to perpetuate the fiction that it was part of a Malay sultanate.”72 However, the Temenggong Abdul Rahman died in 1825 and was succeeded by his son Ibrahim, whose interests were largely in establishing the position of Johore. Sultan Hussein, Singapore’s putative head of state, died at Melaka in 1835, and no successor was appointed. The British “simply allowed the position to vanish.”73 In 1824, however, the sultan had ceded the settlement and was denuded of authority. He could offer no resistance when the East India Company’s convicts employed in road building were ordered to smash down his wall, dividing his compound in half.74 By locating Europeans between the two dominant native communities (the Chinese and the Malays) and dividing the Malays from the very outset, Raffles prevented their political cooperation. While the Portuguese and Dutch had fortified themselves against the subject races, the British had reversed this policy and used geographical barriers and urban regulation to segregate and contain the poorer classes of natives.75 These covert urban strategies provoked the introversion of the native town into tightly knit residential enclaves, which

46

hidden hands and divided landscapes

marked spatially distinct spaces for native habitation. The racially motivated spatial configuration of European and native towns in Singapore contrasted sharply with the “socially neutral” and “rigidly defined” public spaces of England’s emerging industrial order.76 Segregation was justified in the colonies by identifying natives as racially distinct collectivities with premodern practices who were in need of colonial patronage and government. The town plans for Singapore that were produced from 1822 to 1857 are valuable indices of the objectives of government. The orthogonal grid was used in the Straits to generate property taxes and ensure long-term settlement, a land policy that had met with very little success in Penang.77 The Land Office and Survey Department controlled the sale and division of land while Municipal Acts nos. XII of April 1839; IX of 1848; and XII, XIV, XV, XXV and XXVII of 1856 collectively organized assessment and taxation of property, the proceeds of which were to be used for the conservancy of the towns, policing, and legislation.78 As observed by Arjun Appadurai, the cadastral project was in fact “part of a complex apparatus of discipline and surveillance . . . in which number played a complex set of roles . . . and constituted a rehearsal, for a later discourse concerning human communities and their enumeration.”79 Although an ideal plan drawn under Lieutenant Phillip Jackson in 1823– 1824 projected the grid across the entire landscape, neatly organizing the native quarters, in reality it served to “inscribe European pre-eminence” and to separate the Chinese from the Malay settlements.80 The grid not only determined the size of building blocks, but it also managed particular relationships between different races and facilitated governance. In contrast with the idealized plan, an actual survey of the town of Singapore, under G. D. Coleman in 1836, showed a number of man-made grids competing for authority, where those of the nonEuropean population—the Chinese, Malays, and Indians—were largely agricultural holdings. Gambier plantations, paddy fields, brick fields, and sireh gardens made temporary claims on arable land while residences were grouped together in the adjacent marshlands.81 J. T. Thompson’s plan of 1843 shows how segregation had transformed Singapore into a marked ethnic landscape with distinct building types for distinct groups of migrants. In Thompson’s plan, the Europeans occupied landed housing on sizeable plots in the central plain, the Malays were clustered in timber and attap kampung houses around their chieftain’s residence, while the Chinese lived in row upon row of tube-like shophouses. The orderly spread of European space in its rectilinear grid contrasted sharply with the geomorphic occupation of land by other settlers. The most interesting, albeit revealing, anomaly in this map is the new commercial square, constructed in 1825 using convict labor. It was a planted green, 200 x 50 yards square, surrounded by mercantile establishments.82 The square

Figure 4. Town plan of Singapore, showing grid system, based on G. D. Coleman’s survey plan of 1836 (from Hancock, Coleman’s Singapore, 39 [redrawn by author]).

Figure 5. Comparative study of early nineteenth-century urban fabric, showing European and non-European settlement patterns (based on the town plan by J. T. Jackson, 1843, IOR: X/3349/2, British Library [drawn by author]).

divided landscapes

49

placed European merchant houses adjacent to the Chinese settlement while commercial godowns (warehouses) were located at the nearby boat quay along the riverbank. On the north bank across the river was the civic center, and during the 1830s Fort Fullerton was added at the river mouth, both authoritatively overlooking the Chinese settlement. The segregation of urban activities and the location of military and commercial activities outside the European town were unusual for colonial urban planning of the period. In India or Ceylon, the military, commercial, and administrative centers were located adjacent to one another. In Europe, planned urban segregation (by zoning) would occur later in the century in response to industrialization. In Singapore, the positioning of a symbolic piece of commercial property outside the European town and set apart from public institutions suggested that migrant enterprise underwrote the free market. It also signified the freedom of trading and the mobility offered to immigrant settlers. Although European merchants originally lived above their commercial establishments, they gradually removed to the European town, effecting the segregation of residence from commerce. The location and shared use of the commercial square did not pass without comment; in fact, it was a major irritation to European settlers. While they had originally intended it as an ornamental public space, abstracted and produced by the capitalist economy, the shared square was inevitably appropriated for pragmatic purposes. The European residents complained that the Chinese used it as a receptacle for all kinds of lumber and rubbish instead of being kept clean. Iron tanks, old boxes broken wheels, add little ornament to the green sward. [The previous week] one half of the square was converted into a stable, where some twenty miserable ponies were secured and left to graze until they were sold, which was not until after being on the spot some four or five days and nights. On some days the open space of the square [was] covered with old sails, at other times damaged or “doctored” teas, pepper or cotton [were] spread out, and almost every day some articles of furniture, intended for sale at auction, [occupied] part of the public road.83

Similar differences informed representations and treatment of native communities. In Singapore, British administrators, merchants, military personnel, and plantation owners were the civilized citizenry, and free settlers who came to the settlement from China, India, Malaya, or other neighboring countries were regarded as “semi-civilized races.”84 Cultural distinctions were produced in an orientalist colonial rhetoric that commented on differences in lifestyle and complained that native settlers immigrated to the settlement solely for trade, with

50

hidden hands and divided landscapes

no desire “to conform” to its institutions or laws. Their autonomy was read as a sign of reluctance to settle permanently. The Chinese, although “industrious,” irritated the British with their preference for self-government.85 The Malays were allied to their rajahs on the mainland and consequently untrustworthy, while the Indians were docile subjects under British rule in the subcontinent. Moreover, the predominance of males in the migrant population was said to increase their belligerence.86 According to Turnbull, although Light had introduced the system used by the Dutch in Melaka of administering different communities through their headmen, who held their own courts to settle minor disputes, this system was abolished in theory in Penang in 1807, when the courts of judicature were set up, and in Singapore in 1826, when they were extended to all three settlements.87 Various forms of self-government continued nevertheless through religious institutions, cultural associations (kongsis), and secret societies (hoeys). For these reasons the public (civic) landscape was separated from native space, integrated with the European town, and catered to European citizenship concerns.88

The Public Landscape of Singapore Colonial stereotypes of the dual city are invariably reproduced in discussions of Singapore’s public landscape, positing an orderly European town against multiple chaotic native quarters. Public landscapes of European colonies were always designed to impress, and even in the earliest examples the church, the government buildings, and the jail were organized around the main plaza in a prominent part of the city.89 In Singapore, the river and the esplanade provided a grand visual perspective. The first institutional works undertaken during the early years included religious and secular establishments. Government offices often leased private residences, as in the case of the courthouse, which was leased from John Maxwell (1827). Most significant among these examples was the early introduction of modern colonial institutions, which imposed new forms of rationality, such as timetables and regulations, on colonial subjects. An 1857 map of Singapore by S. Narayanen, one of many Indian tracers involved in mapmaking, is particularly useful for understanding the symbolic significance of the public landscape during this period.90 We might imagine it as being the uninterrupted view from the governor’s residence atop Government Hill. We may also imagine it as largely built by convict labor. The Government House site was supported by a system of defenses that outlined and fortified the chain of hillocks from which the town braced itself against an attack on the seafront. The cantonment occupied the first of these hills at the southernmost point of the town with a clear view of the straits and the harbor. At the very center of the map was the convict jail with its new disciplinary regime,

divided landscapes

51

the largest complex of buildings to be located within the European town. The sheer expanse of the prison was countered by the competing heights of adjacent church spires: the Armenian Church (1835), St. Andrews Cathedral (1856–1861), the French Church, Good Shepherd’s Cathedral (1843–1846) and the Portuguese Church, St. Josephs (1822), and the religious morality they proffered.91 On the north bank of the Singapore River were familiar symbols of law and authority, the old courthouse, town hall, resident councilor’s house and government offices, and new courthouse on the side of Government Hill. These buildings were flanked by a generous esplanade at the town center, the public space for official entertainments and social display. Collectively the prison, the churches and the government offices embellished by the esplanade communicated alternative and competing forms of morality to their native audiences. As observed by Robbie Goh, many of these institutions began life in vernacular style shophouses in the native quarter, entirely appropriate to their original mission, but gradually shed these associations and physical elements to emerge as overdetermined symbols of colonial power.92 They subsequently “reproduced and extended themselves through the colonial city, rewriting space into the image of [their] own Anglocentrism.”93Aesthetically they spread their institutional forms and styles “beyond the boundaries of the civic district to private residences and institutions.”94 As the public landscape escaped the boundaries of the European town and spilled into the native towns, it took on very different programs. Public buildings on marshlands fell into three categories: medical institutions such as asylums or hospitals, police stations, and markets. Accordingly, the classical forms of the seaman’s hospital (1846) and the Tan Tock Teng hospital for paupers (1844) were located south of the Singapore River outside Kreta Ayer, whereas the central police station was at its center. The mental asylum and the general hospital (completed in 1860) were north of the Rocher River adjacent to the race course and next to the Kendang Kerbau police station. It was evident from the distribution of public buildings that criminality and disease were anticipated outside the European settlement. Open spaces, such as the race course, the botanical gardens, and the cemeteries, were also located outside the town for more functional or sanitary reasons. The commercial square signaled the only public activity common to both Europeans and natives: commerce. Colonial institutions constructed privilege and delineated class and race distinctions. The individuation and education of British colonial subjects was conducted in furnished, linear, or cellular building complexes with repetitive structures. In these new urban institutions, colonial administrators taught European values to future citizens. The Raffles Institution (1823, 1836–1841) for example, “a school for all races which taught various branches of knowledge

52

hidden hands and divided landscapes

except religious studies,” not only educated the children of the sultan and Temenggong but attracted students sent by the king of Siam.95 Institutions such as these created a comprador class sympathetic to colonial rule by fashioning European subjectivity as distinct from the native experience.96 However, institutions in the native parts of the settlement “for the lower classes” were organized for disciplining unruly collectives. The report on the administration of the settlements during this period typically enumerates native populations by both race and religion, conflating the Malays and Indians by identifying Mohammedans and Hindus. The administration noted that immigrants from “China, Arabia, Continental India, Burma, Siam, Sumatra, Java and sundry other places to the eastward of the Bay of Bengal” congregated “as on neutral ground” with “no feeling of citizenship and no common desire to co-operate for future and general benefit.”97 This noncooperation was attributed to the fact that they were from the “lower orders of their respective communities” and came with their country’s laws and habits “stereotyped” on their minds.98 The same grid that was used to homogenize a comprador class into European modes of socializing was now being applied to the segregation of different cultures. Race and class barriers confined large immigrant communities to native districts that housed a diversity of crafts and trades.99 Their shared poverty and interdependence forced forms of reliance on cultural and communal relationships that in turn enabled specific forms of autonomy. As described by Brenda Yeoh, property use “sought to minimize travelling and maximize the versatility of each individual locality.” In short, zoning was a luxury they could not afford.100 Moreover, the migrants depended on the support of an intricate social and economic network, “for none of the institutions in which they lived were capable of self-support.”101 These attributes reminded Europeans of their medieval towns, where similar interknit moral economies had been the norm. Despite these diverse concerns, the colonial government worked hard at regulating the native towns and extracting revenue. On the first of January each year, the town commission collected a ground rent of one, two, and three Spanish silver dollars for every fathom of front, according to class of street.102 Houses were numbered and residents were issued certificates of possession.103 The government determined the façade width for all brick and tiled houses for the sake of “uniformity and gaining as much room as possible.”104 In addition, each house was required to have “a verandah of a certain depth, as a continued and covered public walkway” that adapted the buildings for pedestrian movement. These regulations limited building frontage and gave a homogeneous appearance to the town. The public spaces of the native towns were pedestrian environments, streets and open spaces related to religious buildings, community associations such

divided landscapes

53

as kongsis, and markets. From among these, the market was the native public sphere, the common secular territory where various cultures intersected.105 Its manifestation in architectural form was due to efforts by the colonial government to extract revenue by rent of stalls and to contain refuse. As observed by Anand Yang, they demonstrated the marketization of society and the imbrication of new immigrants in the world capitalist system.106 In his view, the colonial desire to contain native commerce in designated buildings was also an attempt at surveillance and control, at imposing law and order against collective violence. Conversely, the spontaneous emergence of markets, the dissemination of goods by hawkers, and the expansion and multiplication of market space in the Straits suggest a sphere of activity that was not totally subordinate to colonial forces. The first market was located at the north end of Market Street and was demolished on Raffles’ instructions in 1822. A new market was built to replace it further south in Telok Ayer in 1824. A temporary market that had sprung up in the interim was cleared away, provoking panic that threatened to break into an urban riot.107 The markets, which after 1825 were built and maintained by convict labor, were exclusive to the native communities and were plural environments, that is, sites where various ethnic communities came together for commerce. The Telok Ayer market was rebuilt several times in 1838 and 1894, Ellenborough market was built in 1845, and Clyde Terrace and Kampung Gelam markets between 1835 and 1837.108 The immigrants themselves erected several markets, embracing and reproducing this plural space; for example, a group of convictsturned-traders from Malabar built the Chowrastra market in Penang.109 Although initially the Chinese and Malay towns expressed cultural relationships through specific spatial arrangements, these too were impacted by urban regulation. The British located “centrical and commanding sites for the residences of the various Chinese chiefs,” and the clans organized themselves around clan houses.110 The clan house or kongsi was the most important building for each Chinese clan group and acted as a commercial organization, a bank, a community center, and a safe house for new immigrants. It often housed hoeys or secret societies that protected and defended their clan members.111 Due to the cohabitation of numerous competing dialect groups within the same commercial environment, the Chinese town developed as an urban grid with multiple public centers. Toa Por (the Great Town), at Kreta Ayer to the south of the river, was a tightly packed urban space of contiguous two- or threestory shophouses.112 In contrast with Toa Por, the Malay quarter in Singapore, known as Kampung Gelam, was centrally organized around the main mosque and the dwelling of the sultan.113 Here the hierarchy of religion and authority dominated. A few hundred local Malays and Arab traders formed the immediate cluster at the center of the

54

hidden hands and divided landscapes

main kampung, with adjacent kampungs for Bugis, Javanese, and other Malay immigrants. Houses retained their rural character during the early period and were loosely organized timber and attap structures raised a few feet off the ground on heavy timber piles. Extended families and kinship groups would live in adjacent buildings, sharing outdoor spaces for cooking, washing, bathing, and stabling animals. Gradually, however, with increasing numbers of Malay traders settling in the area, these buildings too gave way to contiguous shophouses. The Chulias (Muslim Indians from the Coromandel Coast) resided upriver on the southern bank during the early period and were employed as lightermen. Other Indian communities were interspersed among the Chinese and Malays, as is evident from the location of the earliest Hindu temples in the Chinese area. Indian sepoys, who arrived at the very inception of the colony, were stationed initially in the Bras Basah area (later at Outram) and were accompanied by “the bazaar contingent”—the prostitutes, dhobis, tea makers, servants, etc., who serviced them.114

Residential Life in Singapore As in all colonial contexts, the space occupied by the small British colonial community far exceeded the space allocated to the migrant population. According to the first census in 1824, out of a total of 10,683 inhabitants, Europeans numbered 74 (see Appendix C).115 The European residential grid was located between Bras Basah and Rocher Roads, with Middle Road marking the center of the grid.116 Their life, observes T. G. McGee, “was remarkably imitative of aristocratic life in England, centering around elaborate entertaining, garden parties, club membership and tremendous concern with social status.117 The social spaces of the European colonial public sphere were its clubs, hotels, and bars. The exclusivity of this social landscape is perhaps best demonstrated by the Hokkien name for the Penang town hall, Ang Mo Kong Koan—translated as European Club—for town halls were frequently used by Europeans both for public meetings and theatrical productions.118 A plantation economy and an overcrowded city provoked the migration of colonial residents to country bungalows in the interior as early as the 1830s.119 In Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century, industrialization would provoke an equivalent flight to the countryside, carving out a landscape of segregated garden suburbs.120 As theorized by Anthony King, the colonial bungalow was adapted first as a house for the European community and then as an image that was transferred to the metropolitan center, London.121 In this way metropolitan subjectivity was informed by peripheral discourses. By 1865, with the clearing of land for plantations, many of the colonial residences were located about two miles out of town, often on tiny hillocks with gardens and orchards.122

divided landscapes

55

Both colonial houses and native shophouses have already been discussed in detail in a number of sources.123 It is sufficient to observe that the AngloIndian style adopted by Europeans and described by John Cameron and others were detached bungalows in a picturesque garden, which reinforced the centrality of India for the British colonial imagination.124 However, in Singapore they were often raised above the ground on short masonry columns in the manner of Malay stilt houses. Each detached bungalow represented in a microcosm the luxury of expanding European space as commanded from the residence at its center. The segregation of residential and commercial activities and the daily animation of Europeans along tree-lined avenues allowed this small minority to exercise authority over a disproportionate area of the settlement. Their evening drive by horse carriage or gharry to and from the public spaces was a form of social display that ritually marked their territory.125 The openness of European dwelling space contrasted sharply with the cramped dwelling environments of immigrants. The shophouses in the native towns were tube-like introverted spaces, between party walls. The width of all the interior spaces was limited by the span of local timber beams and by the calculation of taxes according to the width of the building façade.126 The need to accommodate outdoor habits within this indoor arrangement provoked the use of multiple courtyards organized in degrees from most public to private. Urban enclaves, borrowed from Chinese spatial types, were typically organized as clan villages around kongsi houses.127 The narrow frontage and introverted form of the shophouse, packed within a dense urban grid, was a response to the artificial spatial boundaries encountered by immigrants. In her influential study of late nineteenth-century contestations over space in the colonial city, Brenda Yeoh describes how the dark interiors of the shophouse presented an obstacle to the legibility of these spaces and impeded the sanitary projects of the colonial government.128 She observes that the occupation of the shophouse was equally difficult to codify because of its division into semiprivate compartments for an extended family system. For example, the accommodation of fresh immigrants led to the division of interior space, tenement fashion, and the verandah became the extension of an internal, often communal, arrangement. Additionally, the verandah proved to be the most contentious part of the shophouse; it was a public walkway, it was continuously used for storage and for the display of goods, it was leased out to hawkers or rented as sleeping space, and it was used for weddings or funerals. So, according to Yeoh, it became the target of colonial municipal legislation in the later period.129 The necessity to conflate the public and the private in this manner made the Asian shophouse “illegible.”

56

hidden hands and divided landscapes

An interesting contradiction problematizes the comparison between these two residential types, the bungalow and the shophouse.130 Although the householder and the family unit were individuated, after a fashion, in the Anglo-Indian bungalow, their servants lived on the compound in the kitchens, servants’ rooms, and stables. Feudal master-servant relations determined the division of public and private spaces.131 In contrast, the complex ethnic and clan affiliations essential for survival provoked a “modern subjectivity” linked to a new urban experience in Singapore’s shophouses.132 By the 1850s the compaction of large populations of rural migrants into tight urban spaces had turned the native towns into hubs of pedestrian activity and generated urban versions of rural practices. Festivals that typically spread themselves out in village pastures were crowded into narrow streets between tall masonry houses. The neutral façades of shophouses, moreover, whitewashed numerous activities such as brothels, opium dens, gambling houses, and secret societies. Evidently, the intimate spaces of both European and non-European private life were equally complex and differentiated. If their occupants’ attitudes to public space varied considerably, this was largely a consequence of a particular devolution of power. The European town had the luxury of expanding space while the native towns had to make do with what was available. Colonial associations of the former as ordered and transparent and the latter as impenetrable were influenced by their relative spatial entitlements. Equally, images of congestion, criminality, and chaos that were often used in describing the native towns were constructs through which Europeans could maintain a privileged distance. The allocation and distribution of space defined a political terrain that was used to differentiate both class and race.

Illegal Economies Colonial travelers like Isabella Bird (1879), Cuthbert Collingwood (1866– 1867), George Earl (1833–1834), and Dr. J. Berncastle (1849) provide cultural vignettes of the native town in Singapore that invariably reproduce familiar orientalist stereotypes.133 The town was busy, congested, and dirty, and the streets were narrow and chaotic. Due to the juxtaposition of chaos or heterogeneity against the rational order of the European town, native spatial practices were often experienced as encroachments. The reorganization and regulation of the native districts, which had not troubled the previous colonists in Melaka and Penang, became a nineteenth-century preoccupation. Native domestic life was scrutinized as the generative site of non-European morality and culture, and its shortfalls were used for justifying colonization.134 In fact, there appeared to be an exaggerated emphasis on native degeneracy in Singapore.

divided landscapes

57

The rhetoric of European racial superiority concealed a pressing moral concern that shrouds the history of the Straits Settlements. Carl Trocki describes Singapore as “Opium Central Southeast Asia” and the British Empire east of the Suez as essentially a drug cartel.135 In fact, British merchants initially employed opium as one of their major forms of capital, and Singapore’s continuing status as a free port was only possible because of excise farm revenue.136 Opium was a major exchange commodity for local Straits produce. Its price affected the value of other commodities, and the distribution of opium to the local Chinese “constituted the first and the most enduring link between the colonial administration and the population.”137 More importantly, the farm through which opium was distributed was the crucial link between the administration, the economy, and the Chinese secret societies. Farming in the Straits context referred to a system of awarding government tenders for enterprises run by native settlers.138 Apart from pepper and gambier farming, the revenues accrued from vices varied from two-thirds of the revenue in Melaka to four-fifths of the total revenue in Singapore, and it was used, ironically, to pay the salaries of the police.139 The memorandum for the returns of the year 1855–1856 describes them as being “derived more from the vices than the industry of the people.”140 Because the settlements were free ports, the import and export duties for pepper, gambier, sugar, and other commercial crops was minimized and profits had to be made through an excise farm system. Opium, spirit, bhang (cannabis), and gambling farms, run typically by Chinese farmers, brought essential revenues to the settlements’ economy and proved highly profitable, a fact reiterated in Cameron’s account.141 He observed, “the opium farm had its origin in the necessities of the local exchequer,” a detail often glossed over by local critics of the system and consequently of the Chinese “habit.”142 Dr. J. Berncastle, keen to observe “the baneful effects of opium smoking,” visited an opium shop in Singapore and concluded, “I am not going to sanction the custom at all, but seeing much worse practices at home, we should be cautious how we blame these half-barbarous people, without religion, or the advantages of education and civilization.”143 The illicit activities that serviced the Straits economy had to be managed strictly outside the European part of the settlement. They were confined to marginal spaces such as brothels, bars, opium dens, and gambling houses, which were confined within the city’s native quarters on the south side of the river. European versions of these same trades were frowned upon, as they eroded the moral distinctions between Europeans and natives. Conversely, in travel narratives of this period, new colonial categories of coolie, prostitute, gambler, and opium smoker are often conflated with one another, expanding the social landscape of delinquency. Identifying sites of native delinquency was in fact useful

58

hidden hands and divided landscapes

for managing illicit economies and ensuring revenue from them while preserving the puritanical face of the government.144 Moreover, the policy of non-interference by the Straits administration enhanced the opacity of the trade, ensuring its continuance while veiling the underlying economic opportunism. Trocki has suggested that increasing addiction among the Chinese likewise facilitated the project of governance by creating a docile population whose wages returned to their source through the high taxation of opium consumption.145 It was in the management of the illegal economies that the government took advantage of their strategies of segregation. Specific vocations, opportunities, and accompanying stigmas would be meted out to different ethnic groups and contained within the specified ethnic quarters. Meanwhile, the separate communities were used to police one another. The shophouses in native districts, cramped unceremoniously together, were used to mark a social boundary and the limits of trespass. In facilitating various forms of “useful delinquency” as proper channels for economic activity, the administration both exploited and produced a divided environment defined by its cultural prejudices.146 However, in the case of the Chinese, who were the main source of labor, the government’s influence was limited. As observed by Trocki, Mak Lau Fong, and others, the kongsi system was adapted to the various colonial economies and performed critical functions for Chinese immigrants involved in these activities.147 There were dialect kongsis, based on village clans or surnames, cemetery kongsis, autonomous mining and plantation coolie kongsis, secret society kongsis, maritime merchant kongsis, and revenue farming kongsis.148 They enabled adaptation to change and conflict reduction while offering forms of protection the legal system failed to provide.149 They granted extralegal forms of autonomy to kongsi members and accordingly won their loyalty, weakening the reach of the Straits administration. The kongsis organized their labor on their own terms.

Penal Labor The strengthening of these two contrary developments—illicit economies that needed policing and an ungovernable pool of immigrant laborers—set the stage for the emergence of the colonial prison. Within the first five years of the settlement’s history it had already become apparent that the coercive relationship that facilitated colonial urban expansion elsewhere could not be replicated in Straits cities. There was an urgent need for an alternative source of labor and a racially distinct police. However, the climate of “useful delinquency” and accepted levels of illegal activity demanded a response that could take these ethical anomalies into account. The solution was to combine the operation of delinquency, prison, and police in a new source of labor.150

divided landscapes

59

The critical need for labor was evident from the very inception of the colony. When Raffles first arrived in Singapore on the Indiana in 1819, the master of the ship, Captain Pearl, had ballasted his ship with bricks at Penang.151 When he returned to Singapore in May it was with five thousand pieces of timber, five thousand tiles, two hundred parangs, one hundred chungkuls, and even bullocks for the use of an embryonic Public Works Department.152 Throughout this early period, all building materials were being shipped into the settlement at great expense. As described previously, construction labor proved equally costly. According to Raffles’ Malay scribe, Munshi Abdullah, in the earliest endeavor to fill the south bank of the river with free labor, in 1822 two or three hundred laborers and scores of overseers were employed, “looking like men going to war.”153 Labor became more and more expensive daily. It was on the issue of labor that Raffles faced the fundamental problem of a settlement colony with a hierarchic and multiracial structure. Whereas according to Furnivall’s argument, in the precolonial society the disregard for economic values had justified compulsion as a means of securing labor, British colonialism stimulated the desire for economic gain.154 However, labor was not forthcoming. The British residents needed to maintain their racial privilege, the Malays were reluctant to work for foreign rulers, and the “industrious” Chinese were governed by their own kongsi leaders and could not be employed in public projects. Moreover, the immigrant communities demanded substantial wages for their work. By the time Raffles left the colony for England in 1824, only the rudimentary shape of his urban plan had begun to emerge. Faced with the onerous task of maintaining a liberal economy with poor finances and no labor, the Straits government resorted to an indirect form of compulsion. Penang, which had been a penal station from 1790 to 1806 (replacing Port Blair in the Andamans), was already using the East India Company’s convicts for road works and had 772 convicts by 1805.155 Benkulen imported convict labor after 1787. Melaka got its first group of convicts from 1805 to 1808, but became a convict station seventeen years later.156 In 1821 the colonial administration in Calcutta recommended the labor of life-sentence criminals to the Straits government to satisfy their demand for infrastructure works.157 The first batch of 80 convicts, who had originally been transported from Madras to Benkulen, arrived at Singapore on the brig Horatio on 18 April 1825.158 Of them, 73 males and one female were sentenced for life and six other males were on short sentences. The next batch of 122 convicts originally from Bengal arrived on the 25th of the same month. With the transportation of eight to nine hundred convicts from Benkulen to Singapore in 1825, the settlements took on the role of a penal geography for South Asian criminals. Convict expenses, profits to the penal departments, and the movement of prisoners and officials from one penal station to

60

hidden hands and divided landscapes

another created a dynamic transnational geography around convict labor. Due to an unusual system of promotions through labor, Singapore proved to be the penal site most coveted by prisoners. In 1825 convict labor was badly needed in Singapore to clear jungle, fill in the swamps, and build the roads across the new settlement. Since each of these tasks required a dispersal of labor gangs to various parts of the island, surveillance of the offenders by British officers was practically impossible. The success of the penal system depended instead on the physical separation of the island geography and on the ethnic difference between the convicts and other settlers. The system of appointing “prisoners as their own warders” was first experimented with in the Straits penal system and proved successful in 1825 when the resident Mr. Bonham appointed five Madrasees and five Bengalis to supervise their fellow convicts in Singapore.159 The prison was located at the rear of the European town at Bras Basah, unsettling the careful distribution of race to designated parts of the settlement. Its location resonates with descriptions of the dwellings of the European urban poor who lived in alleyways at the rear of elite compounds in Europe’s preindustrial cities and serviced wealthy property owners.160 The prison from the outset located a large body of South Asians with criminal reputations at the heart of European public space and blurred the formal strategies for racial segregation. The first “prison” was a series of linear temporary buildings built on the site previously vacated by the Temenggong, and the “more trusted” prisoners lived in huts outside the convict lines.161 More importantly, the need for a mobile workforce determined its flexibility and imported native “unruliness” into the heart of government. The administration’s reluctance to spend on penal accommodation and the belief that the prisoners were quite harmless combined to offer the penal population an unusual degree of freedom.162 Moreover, the Straits government found they could deploy the prisoners as an intermediary police force, as prison warders, and as watchmen on private properties for the surveillance and management of deviance.163 In fact, colonial police records provide valuable if biased insights into both the organization of native towns and the activities of the prisoners policing them.

Conclusion In the case of Singapore, the ethnic divisions of a plural society were applied to a colonial dual city, and immigrant communities received different forms of treatment depending on their place of origin and their experience with colonization. The Chinese, who had no previous experience with European government, proved the most independent of the three communities and were largely driven by economic opportunism. The Malays were displaced and

divided landscapes

61

abandoned by their rulers, as evident in Munshi Abdullah’s observations, and proved marginal to the colonial project.164 Their political focus was the sultanate of Johor. The Indians on the other hand were a subject community and for the most part reflected the obedient servility expected of them. In contrast with these different relationships with colonial authority, the European perception of immigrant communities was singular in its deprecation. Although culturally distinct and relegated to ethnic neighborhoods, the native population would also be contained within a grid of residential shophouses that conformed to colonial urban regulations. The opacity of native space and control over it were desirable because underlying these carefully constructed dualities was the government’s dependence on an illicit economy. So far, we have perused the Straits government’s efforts to bring a settlement colony under its jurisdiction through the logic of the colonial urban plan. It evidently produced a divided social and physical landscape with carefully managed racial categories. Unlike immigrant communities, transported convicts transgressed the boundaries of race and class due to the central location of that ultimate colonial institution, the prison. In the carefully rationalized spaces of the colonial grid, this early penal community appeared anomalous due to its relative numbers (compared with Europeans) and its location at the center of the European town.165 However, as the prison evolved from informal rural dwellings to an institutional monolith, it proved to be a sensitive register of colonial processes. In fact, we cannot gain an understanding of the colonial city without taking the prison and the penal population into account.

CHAPTE R 3

The Colonial Prison

Penal transportation replicated the premodern practices of exile and slavery by casting deviance outside the spaces of enlightenment. That such policies continued well into the nineteenth century is to be wondered about. In the example of penal transportation to the Straits Settlements, the defamiliarization and individuation caused by physical and cultural isolation was compounded by the pollution associated with transportation for caste Indians.1 For those who fell outside the caste system, such as Muslims, Adivasis, Dalits, and Eurasians, transportation severed critical social solidarities.2 The convict’s physical body was objectified, moved, placed in fetters, subjected to corporal punishment, and exploited through labor. Segregation and incarceration were not the immediate concern in the management of colonial transportees; in fact, transportation spared both metropolitan and colonial governments the expense of building jails. Spatial technologies for disciplining offenders were not introduced until late in the nineteenth century, when reform and rehabilitation were raised as a counterpart to punishment. The notion that penal environments could somehow impact the prisoner’s soul, “as the civil equivalent of religion,” was much debated by colonial officials.3 Moral justifications for modern penitentiaries, which were nevertheless coupled with repressive punitive regimes, surfaced in debates on the merits of segregation in the colonial context and bring us to the second, “spatial,” interpretation of confinement. Should reform be directed at perfecting the laboring body or at elevating the misdirected soul of the colonial prisoner? These two contradictory themes of the transportation of bodies and the spatial management of souls provide the critical framework for analyzing the colonial prison. “Correction through segregation,” writes Dikötter, was “the key notion which distinguished the modern prison from previous spaces of confinement,” and “[r]eformation has been the most powerfully seductive idea espoused by 62

the colonial prison

63

modern penology.” 4 However, the cellular penitentiary was introduced to British colonies several decades after its debut in Europe. Moreover, unlike the cellular divisions of the panopticon, which individuated and separated the docile subjects of the European state, the colonial prison, for the greater part of its history, was designed to articulate collective identities based on class, race, and labor, and to negotiate the relative standing of the groups thus identified within the colonial administration. Racial hierarchies were manipulated by the colonial administration to its advantage, and equitable and enlightened ideas of citizenship, hitherto measured by space (property ownership) and money (taxation), were calculated upon the differentiated bodies of colonial citizens/subjects. These competing forms of subjectivity underwrote a broader nineteenth-century narrative of conquest, colonization, and settlement. The colonial government, moreover, had a different perception of the moral and ethical purpose of labor. Although European prisons had abandoned hard labor for a disciplinary regime in strict confinement, colonial prisoners continued to labor with comparatively high levels of freedom. The colonial prison that was shaped by these various contradictions was one in which the imperatives of labor supplanted the prerogatives of punishment and reform. Several permutations of the colonial prison as it evolved across the three Straits Settlements are studied in this chapter. Its particular focus is on prison models from the early years at the inception of the settlement (1825–1860). There is evidence that the colonial government constantly reinterpreted the terms of confinement to maximize the deployment of penal labor for urban development. The space allocated to each individual prisoner or racial group of prisoners, the geographic range of his or her mobility and the extent of association allowed between different racial groups chiefly reflected the government’s economic priorities. While association was the preferred penal model, it needed to be rationalized in ways that ensured control of the penal subject and limited his or her mobility during labor. Unlike in Europe, the colonial prison was forced to accommodate an ambivalent authority and priorities outside punishment. While prison spaces remained inherently flexible due to these priorities, alternative systems of segregation gradually took precedence over penal reform. The administration shaped its own ideas of morality and subjectivity, reciprocally, through the constant reorganization of penal spaces, schedules, and sentences so as to maximize labor. Consequently, the prisons discussed in this chapter may be regarded as colonial experiments in governance through spatial management at both the physical and administrative levels. Punishment when exacted was applied on the body and not the soul of the colonial prisoner. The policies and opinions of residents and administrators inevitably mark penal history in the settlements. The felons, whether civil or political, were typically

64

hidden hands and divided landscapes

described as bandits and murderers. Their punishment was geographical separation from caste and kin and transportation across the kala pani (black water)5 to unknown Southeast Asian destinations.6 Annually, transportation brought an average of one hundred prisoners, both men and women, to the Straits Settlements, binding the three cities in a network of penal appointments, promotions, and retransportations that mirrored the circulation of colonial administrators and military officers.7 The prisoners’ contribution to the economy was calculated into all significant urban undertakings, and their labor compensated the colony for its economic marginalization by the Calcutta-based colonial government. The fruits of penal labor ultimately enabled three neglected settlements to assert themselves as emerging urban centers and gain autonomy from India in 1867.8 We focus, therefore, on that early period when penal labor was essential for the infrastructure of the colony.

The Prisoner of the Passage From the very inception of its settlement colonies, the British colonial administration, preoccupied with the task of annexing land, encouraging settlement, and planning colonial townships, had found that the penal system could be put to far better use in providing an inexpensive and reliable source of labor. Transportation as penal labor was considered a fitting form of punishment for all manner of crimes, particularly as long-term sentences for manslaughter and homicide. As detailed by Clare Anderson, Stephen Nicholas, and others, Portugal, Spain, Germany, and Britain were involved in this practice, the most significant numbers being the more than fifty thousand British convicts who were transported to America following the transportation act of 1718.9 This traffic was redirected following the American Revolution, and Australia was colonized in order to receive some 160,000 convicts. Once slavery was abolished in 1833, the colonial prisoner had replaced the colonial slave. In short, in the first half of the nineteenth century, colonial governments established transportation as a norm, necessary for colonial expansion, drawing on an earlier premodern practice of banishment. Increasingly, prisoners were being transported from Europe to its dominions, or between Europe’s colonial outposts, for labor in infrastructure and other public works. Clare Anderson describes the South Asian convict stream as the most significant from among these, numerically. As many as eighty thousand convicts were transported between 1787 and 1943 to the following destinations: Benkulen (1787 to 1825), Mauritius (1815 to 1837), Melaka (1805 to 1808 and 1822 to 1860),10 Penang (1790 to 1860 except between 1811 and 1813), Singapore (1825 to 1873), Arakan and Tenassarim provinces (1828 to 1862), and Port Blair in the

the colonial prison

65

Andamans (1858 to 1943), with the largest numbers being to the Straits Settlements (twenty thousand) and the Andamans (fifty thousand). Transportation of Indians in fact commenced in the same year that Australia became a penal colony. There were other convict streams in the region from Asia to Africa, the West Indies, and Australia, but the South Asian stream is most relevant to our discussion. Similarly, Chinese and Malay convicts were being transported from the Straits Settlements to Indian jails and to the new colony of Labuan (an island off Borneo) when labor was required there.11 Although there were Indian prisoners from every class and caste, including Hindus, Muslims, and Christians from various sectors in the colonial economy, transportees were often represented as bandit tribes or political rebels. Anderson observes that an 1836 law decreed that any person guilty of belonging to a gang of thugs could be imprisoned for life, even retroactively, and did not have to be convicted of a specific crime.12 Identification in this manner as a collective rather than an individual suggested, in her view, a form of social rather than biological criminalization. Individualization was more likely to occur in the categorization of political prisoners, although they too were often identified as groups. Anticolonial rebellions in India, such as the Anglo-Sikh war (1845– 1846), the Shanthal rebellion (1855), the Indian Mutiny (1857–1858), and the Kandyan rebellions in Ceylon (1818 and 1848) each produced its cohort of political transportees. Polygar rebels from the Malabar coast, Adivasi communities who resisted revenue collection, and state prisoners such as the Mogul emperor of Delhi and the Burmese king and queen were all incorporated into this global exodus.13 Indian prisoners would be sent initially to local prisons and await their sentence of transportation. For example, the Alipur Gaol, built in 1810 and used for this purpose, accommodated more than a thousand prisoners.14 The formulation of colonial penal labor policy around networks of penal transportation occurred around the same time that the shortcomings of productive labor were being debated by European prison reformers. Transportation momentarily removed colonial prisoners from the imperatives of metropolitan reform and placed them in a time frame as yet outside its initiatives. Two reasons may be cited to explain this distinction between penal policy in Europe and its colonies: the economic determinism and need for cheap labor, described previously, and the racialization of criminal tendencies through which nonEuropean prisoners were placed beyond reform, indeed beyond intelligence. These differences were emphasized in discussions of caste in the Indian penal system and in the deliberate transportation of Indian prisoners to racially different colonial environments. We find evidence of racial manipulation in three contemporaneous examples of British penal colonies: Burma (Tennaserim and Arakan provices), the

66

hidden hands and divided landscapes

Andaman Islands, and the Straits Settlements. In Burma, where transportees were inserted into a large indigenous population, Indian prisoners provided a familiar intermediary culture and knowledge of colonial habits that was useful in bridging or maintaining the gap between the Burmese and the British.15 In the Andamans, racial difference segregated and isolated the transportees from the hostile native tribes, whereas in the polyglot migrant population of the Straits, the Indian minority was classified and categorized using numerous strategies to maintain their distinctiveness.16 As was already evident in the planning of the colonial city, democratic institutions yoked to coercive practices produced systemic hybrids that constantly undermined the “enlightened” yet consistently racist policies of penal reform. As mentioned previously, the first group of Indian prisoners was retransported to Singapore from Benkulen as part of the political exchange of a Dutch colony for a British one: Melaka for Benkulen.17 For the next fifty years, the Straits Settlements, which already had a sizable immigrant population, had to play the role of a penal colony. From 1825 to 1873 both male and female convicts transported from Bengal, Madras, and Bombay presidencies, from the island of Ceylon further to the south, and small numbers from Burma and Hong Kong were received in the colonial Straits Settlements and contributed to the rapid expansion of its public works.18 The transformation of their accommodation from the simplest of huts to the first generation of prison buildings will be detailed in this chapter. Contrary to official urban histories, which foreground European ingenuity and immigrant industry as solely responsible for Singapore’s urban development, the built environment of colonial Singapore expanded due to a steady supply of convict laborers. The superintendent of convicts doubled as the executive engineer, and the colonial engineer’s office was in the convict jail at Bras Basah.19 Consequently a robust lineage of colonial architects and military and civil engineers, namely G. D. Coleman (Singapore 1833–1841), Colonel (later General) Henry Man (1845–1855), Lt. Colonel R. MacPherson (Singapore 1855, Melaka 1857), J. T. Thompson (1844–1853), and Major J. F. A. McNair (1857– 1877), were as important for their systems of penal discipline as for undertaking infrastructure and architectural work (see Appendix D). In fact, the predominance of military engineers differentiates the Straits penal system from that of India and Burma, allying it with the Australian example. The prison superintendents in the Straits played roles quite similar to Captain (later Colonel Sir) Edmund Henderson and Lieutenant (later General Sir) Edmund du Cane in Australia, or in fact of Major General Sir Joshua Jebb in England. However, the cultural and racial difference between engineer and laborer, the different systems of construction deployed, and the climate adapted to in the design of penal facilities sets these examples apart.

the colonial prison

67

In the Straits Settlements the elevation of the colony’s permanent building stock from timber and attap to brick and mortar with tiled roofs, in European ornamental styles, was achieved with penal labor. The prison served as a central city depot for public and municipal work and workers. More importantly, the selection of warders from out of the penal population afforded the prisoners various opportunities for self-government.20 These features, which were held in common to varied degrees across the penal settlements described above, are evidence of the continuation of productive penal labor, the public visibility of punishment, and the fact that prisoners were not confined in permanent structures during this early period. In fact, scholars have argued that the arbitrary methods of punishment and ad hoc penal facilities used by colonial administrators were characteristic of precolonial regimes where punishment and deterrence alone were the objectives.21 Corporal punishment in public was translated into public humiliation through labor in the colonies. That the labor was argued as being reformative and that no further reform was considered necessary by colonial officials suggests the continued focus on the body rather than the soul of the colonial prisoner. Different perceptions regarding European versus non-European prisoners meant that external forms of coercion had to be maintained in the colonial prison, and fetters and shackles continued to be used on prisoners laboring outdoors. Since individual reform was considered unlikely due to the prisoners’ incapacity for interiorized self-discipline, modern disciplinary practices were imposed on the collective, the penal social body. When compared with the early stages of penal reform in Britain, from the 1830s to the 1860s, we find that the disciplinary regime was the only feature that was adapted in the Straits. Isolation and religious or moral education was not advocated. Moreover, the disciplinary practices that were imposed on Europeans in a bid to rationalize them into docile subjects were used to manage docile collectives of colonial prisoners. These efforts, however, like their European equivalents, were measured and articulated in relation to notions of space.

The Space of Imprisonment In the city that was being built with convict labor, the imperatives of labor and its relationship to property ownership fashioned a different penal subjectivity. As argued by Partha Chatterjee in his discussion of colonial Bengal, “the project of modernity was insurmountably limited by the nature of colonial rule itself,” and disciplinary institutions and practices were compromised and subverted in order to maintain a specifically colonial form of power.22 Colonial modes of governance imploded into systems of classification and categorization

68

hidden hands and divided landscapes

in order to manage a political and economic hierarchy of racial difference. In the case of the prisoner, who according to his sentence became the property of the colonial state and was directed to labor for it, we encounter the most extreme example of such individuation.23 As argued in this chapter, penal entitlements were manipulated through the graduation of space as an extension of the body and measure of freedom. The physical body of the nineteenth-century prisoner had already been constructed through individual spatial entitlements long before he or she reached the penal colony. On board the transport vessel that departed from the sending colony, the prescribed space for each prisoner was calculated at fifty-four cubits of area around each separate body.24 Shipboard rations were weighed out once a week with respect paid to religious differences, and a gallon of water, kept under guard, was measured out every morning for drinking and for cooking. The health of each convict was scrutinized for contagious diseases, and a pattern of bringing convicts up for bathing and for relieving themselves was established by a system of rotation.25 Confined in the hold of the prison ship, the jet junaza (living tomb) prisoners who faced that “great uncertainty” had already entered a world of schedules and classifications mediated by spatial constraints.26 At the penal colony the barriers were both geographical and cultural. In its island form the colony was isolated from its adjacent hinterland. Since its containment of penal subjects was achieved through geographic separation rather than confinement, innovative methods were sought to restrain its penal population. Disciplinary techniques and technologies such as fetters and shackles, tattoos, clothing, calendars, regulations, and a system of rewards replicated and replaced systems of physical confinement. The colonial prison was overly rationalized through a surfeit of regulatory systems. The Bengal regulations allowed twenty superficial feet for each native and forty for each European, excluding European females and certain classes of prisoners.27 Since they did not stipulate an enclosed space, prisoners could be located in cells, apartments, wards/dormitories, verandahs, or huts, as the need arose. In the early period, the jails in all three settlements were organized to cater to two categories of prisoners: local prisoners and transportees, with the former including revenue prisoners, debtors, those awaiting trial or sentence, and other categories of felons from among the native population. In all three of the Straits Settlements the jail buildings were related to police and magistrate’s offices and were located at the urban center. They were relatively small buildings, police lockups with a few cells intended as temporary holding spaces for local prisoners.28 The old Dutch prison in Melaka, a jail building near Acheen Street in Penang (according to an 1803 map), and a temporary prison in Singapore that the British found when they first arrived, were put

the colonial prison

69

to this purpose.29 The hangman’s green was located further south at the heart of Kreta Ayer, where hangings would have the greatest impact and audience.30 These first few prisons were not purpose-built and were largely used for warehousing prisoners. Due to the inadequacy of these prisons and the fact that prisoners were out in public performing public works, the prisoner’s bodies became the primary sites for the exercise of penology during this early period. Following a directive from the Bengal government in 1825, the first batch of prisoners was classified “by a very minute scrutiny into the characters, conduct and state of the convicts mental and bodily.”31 They were assessed under their name, father’s name, sex, date of arrival in the colony, crime for which transported, period of transportation and sentence of court, age, description, state of health, work for which the prisoner was fit, previous employment, and remarks as to general conduct. Convictions were typically for murder, thuggee, and dacoity (see Appendices E and F).32 Koorrum (Khurram), number five among thirty prisoners transported to Penang in 1825 on similar charges, was described as the son of Mukoond (Mukund) from the sect or cast aheer (Ahir), convicted in Furruckabad (Farrukhabad) in the Bengal presidency. He was convicted for murdering Rada Kishen and Bhotelal and for plundering the house of Busant Roy. His sentence, delivered on 9 December 1823, was “imprisonment in transportation, beyond sea, for life.”33 Khurram’s religion, caste, and gender affected the terms of his association with other prisoners. Religion was particularly important in distinguishing between Hindus, Muslims, and Christians and in determining clothing or diet.34 Such caste distinctions were considered a safeguard against any possible combined revolt.35 The description of the prisoner emphasized the details of his physical body and its scars, complexion, height, and demeanor. The prisoner’s body would be scrutinized for signs of his criminality, which were duly recorded in the warrant that accompanied him. These details were checked upon the prisoner’s arrival in the settlements. He was then bathed, photographed, supplied with prison clothing, and given a number by which he was identified until he entered the third class.36 In his warrant, Khurram was described as five feet four and thirty years old. He was dark-colored, his ears were bored, he had a scar on the skull, a mole on the left side of his neck, another under the left collarbone, a boil on the left thigh, and his forehead was marked with the godna (tattoo).37 This mark, which was used to identify prisoners who were transported during the early years (it was abolished in 1849), was typically found on those described as dacoits or thugs.38 A sketch of a convict in the Singapore jail by Frank Marryat (1843–1846) shows the words doomgah tattooed on his forehead, which the British considered synonymous with murderer.39 Tribals and outcastes were among the earliest

70

hidden hands and divided landscapes

transported.40 The band across the forehead was often the only way to distinguish between a convict and a settler and was regarded by the administration as a deterrent against escape. As argued by Anderson, the godna, along with other physical marks, identified Indian convicts as part of a criminalized social body, and they often resisted their inscription.41 In her view, their response was very different from that of transportees to Australia, who carried decorative inscriptions of hopes, memories, or romance indelibly on their transient bodies.42 The appropriation of the godna, a form of decorative tattooing practiced by Indian women, was additionally a strategy of gendering the racially different colonized body, observes Anderson.43 In addition to the godna, the mark of the corah (whip) on the back or the scars from irons around the ankles of many prisoners suggested the primacy of corporal punishment and the need to restrain the body physically in a relatively lax penal environment. Flogging, which was typically inflicted by the cat-o’-ninetails in the presence of the medical officer, marked triangles on the buttock.44 Women were exempt from both flogging and fetters although “removal of hair” in cases of misconduct was permitted, a measure which Arnold describes as “institutional widowhood.”45 Within the system of association, where solitary confinement in cells was reserved for extreme cases, corporal punishment was more acceptable. Thus, during the early period of transportation, from 1825 to the middle of the century, the physical body continued to be the primary site of punishment. The flogging triangle, gallows, and guillotine were associated penal technologies, while labor claimed the energy, efforts, and mobility of this body. The penal landscape only loosely determined the physical and geographic parameters of confinement.

Lines, Godowns, and Commands The most important shift from the scrutiny of the body to the management of space occurs with the design of purpose-built facilities to accommodate Indian transportees. Correspondingly, as physical structures were erected specifically for the penal population, the necessity for shackles and fetters diminished. However, these buildings were very different from the dungeons in forts or military cantonments, although certain military associations persisted. Upon arrival, the transportees would occupy godowns (sheds), barracks, or lines (linear timber and attap huts) set up for the company’s soldiers. In Melaka, the transportees occupied the former Portuguese soldiers’ barracks on the steep eastern side of St. Paul’s Hill, which included a hospital and warder’s quarters, storerooms, and other buildings and was surrounded by a high stone wall built from the old fort ramparts.46 In Penang, transportees were initially stationed

the colonial prison

71

Figure 6. George Town, Penang, showing old jail and convict lines in the 1803 map of Penang (based on Flower, Mutiara: A Perspective of Penang, 40 [redrawn by author]).

at Chowrastra lines on the marshy northwestern corner of George Town, until with increasing numbers the Chowrastra jail was built right opposite. The complex, surrounded by a high wall, included wards or barracks, a two-story hospital ward, women’s ward and warder’s and apothecary’s quarters, cooking places for the different castes, separate latrines for each yard, and guardroom and stores.47 The wards, which were secured at night with iron gates, were described as “long rooms open to the high roof, having windows on either side secured by iron bars.”48 A seven- to eight-foot-wide gangway ran the entire length of each ward, flanked by sleeping platforms (seven feet wide) along its entire length.49 In Singapore, the first group of transportees was housed in a godown on the northern bank of the river. Later, temporary buildings able to accommodate two hundred convicts were constructed near the Hindu temple at the Bras Basah canal for the sum of £13,199 and the convicts resided there with little or no surveillance.50 The site, which had been recently occupied by the first sepoy regiment, thus passed from the military to the penal establishment.51 A painting of

72

hidden hands and divided landscapes

the convict lines in Lady Raffles’ biography shows lines of timber and attap huts arranged in barrack fashion.52 The military association of penal environments had other lasting effects. Convicts were often described as sepoys in Mauritius and kumpanee kenaukur or company servants in the Straits, giving prisoners an authoritative role linked to the administration.53 Straits prisoners were employed as police during internecine riots and as soldier bearers in the Naning War in Malaya (1831–1832).54 Upon arrival in the Andamans, the convicts lived in tents until military-style barracks were constructed, and former sepoys were appointed as overseers.55 In fact, the military association is quite troubling, since, as noted by Zinoman, the Sino-Vietnamese carceral tradition and the subsequent French colonial one evolved directly from prisoner of war camps, an institution that was repressive, not rehabilitative.56 The use of prisoners as guards and overseers undoubtedly reinforced associations with military discipline and facilitated disciplinary practices. Barrack-style accommodation introduced spatial strategies for interiorized self-discipline, which obviously failed to take root in the Straits. The failure of the militarized system may be attributed to the contrast between urban penal structures and rural ones. Commands or kummans, as the convicts called them, were set up in the country districts to enable road works, and they resembled village architecture.57 Furnivall describes the jail in the Tennaserim district as an ordinary wooden bungalow surrounded by a stockade.58 McNair’s account for Singapore observes, They consisted of a stockaded fence, constructed of rough poles of wood from four to six inches in diameter, and from ten to twelve feet long, set perpendicularly in a trench about two feet deep, and placed close together, being secured longitudinally by adze-dressed poles nailed securely on the outside and along the top of them. The stockade enclosed an area sufficient for the erection of a dormitory, cooking place, and sheds for the bullocks employed in carts to convey road material and for protection also against wild animals. The walls of the dormitory were constructed in what is well known as “wattle and daub.” They were made with stout stakes driven firmly into the ground at about one foot apart, twigs of trees were then interwoven, and the whole then thickly plastered with a mixture of clay and cow dung, and when this had become thoroughly dry it was coated with white wash. . . . The dormitories were ten feet high with a continuous open grating of wooden bars at the top, under the eaves of the roof, for the purpose of complete ventilation. The sleeping platforms were raised three feet off the ground floor, which was covered with the same composition as that of the walls, and the building was roofed with thatch. At the center of the dormitory an earthenware brazier of burning charcoal was always maintained day and night.59

the colonial prison

73

A command resembled a small village or farm where convicts would be stationed for long periods. The walls of the stockade, far from incarcerating the prisoners, were used to protect them from wild animals such as tigers. On average, thirty prisoners lived in each command and were locked in at night by a “convict warder,” and a monthly roster brought them to the jail at the town center. The prison for transportees was dispersed in this manner at multiple sites all over the settlement and became the outposts of a surveillance regime that would eventually penetrate the native villages. The prisoners themselves were not subject to its gaze. Their laxity of discipline is best captured in a “hog hunting incident” at Bukit Chermin, reported in the Straits Times. The hunters, who were discovered to be a gang of convicts undertaking necessary repairs to the roads at Mt. Faber, provoked the irate commentary: Really these convicts are, as we noticed last week, a privilleged [sic] class; their situation so far from being one of toil and wretchedness is becoming envied by persons of somewhat lax morals lurking in the settlement. Hog hunting by day and nautches by night would appear to a stranger to be the ordinary employment of convicted felons at the penal settlement of Singapore.60

The quarters first occupied by transportees in the Straits clearly sent mixed signals of order versus laxity to the majority of the convicts. Florence Bernault likewise describes the geographical fluctuation of penal facilities in colonial Africa, where prisons migrated from the center of the European town to its margins, and in fact were physically removed to temporary labor camps in the form of portable wooden convict stations.61 Such changes illustrate the several transformations that occurred during the institutionalization of the penitentiary as a type—linked to a bureaucratic system, in her view.62 Ian Brown similarly describes the transformation of the Rangoon central prison from a wooden structure of the 1850s to a new masonry structure in the 1880s.63 However, early penal models of lines and commands merely served as sleeping quarters. They had no punitive function. For a sustained impact on prisoner behavior, the prison system had to be rationalized internally. Prisoners had to be regulated.

Classification and Categorization In his chapter on labor and loyalty among prisoners in the Andamans, Satadru Sen exposes the contradiction between punitive and rehabilitative ideologies.64 Although prisoners remained outside colonial citizenship, there were repeated efforts to rationalize them into orderly political subjects, not through systems of self-discipline but through a surfeit of disciplinary practices. A far

74

hidden hands and divided landscapes

more abstract system of penal classes had to be devised to regulate their activities.65 As observed by Anderson, although evident in penal colonies, such classificatory systems would have been unthinkable in the Indian mainland at the time.66 The primary innovation of the system in the Straits was the appointment of warders from among the penal population, detailed by McNair.67 Self-regulation from the very inception of the system in 1825 was, in McNair’s opinion, one of the Singapore prison’s several advantages.68 In fact, the self-governing prison was first tested in the Straits before being adopted in India, thus making the colonial periphery an experimental ground for the center. The expense of European soldiers and their poor knowledge of native languages, combined with rapid increases in prisoner numbers, made this system a necessity. By 1856 the numbers of Indian convicts had grown to 3,855 transportees, all of whom were put to labor and badly needed supervision (see Appendix G).69 The desire to maintain a cheap and manageable labor pool, despite limited supervision, meant that surveillance was almost impossible. The overseers who superintended the labor were typically drawn from Portuguese or Eurasian settlers or from among European prisoners. Members of the native staff, who were drawn from among the convicts themselves, far outnumbered the Europeans, and the maintenance of the prison was entirely in convict hands (there were 192 native staff members to six Europeans).70 According to the Butterworth Rules of 1845–1846, the punishment evoked by a prisoner’s sentence initially determined his or her rank in one of six classes of convicts.71 Accordingly, the sixth or least class of prisoners included invalids: elderly and female prisoners who had limited mobility and were not considered fit to perform manual labor. Men would be employed as sweepers or watchmen and were put in charge of latrines or were appointed as caretakers of country bungalows. Women had lighter sentences, worked as sweepers or gardeners, and often took partners within or outside the prison. Often if women had small children they too were transported with their mothers.72 Boys in their early teens, who numbered five or six at any given time, were included in this class.73 Of the categories reserved for men, the fifth class consisted of the “jail gang,” which included criminal and atrocious characters and deserters. They worked in irons, within the limits of the town, on the roads, streets, and in public works. The hours of their labor were from sunrise to twelve noon and from two until sunset, when they were secured for the night in the town lines. The fourth class, who were new arrivals, worked in light irons in the town vicinity and were secured in the town lines at night. Third-class prisoners were those who had completed the probationary course and so were indulged with the removal of one leg iron. They were employed outside the town in clearing

the colonial prison

75

land and cultivation while the best of them were employed in public service. The second-class prisoners worked without irons as convict petty officers, as messengers and punkah pullers in hospitals and public offices and were hired out to individuals as servants. The first class consisted largely of convict orderlies, who upon obtaining a “ticket of leave” (TOL) were considered trustworthy enough to fend for themselves and to appear at a muster twice a month. The TOL system was introduced to relieve penal expenses by permitting convicts to support themselves by hiring out their labor. It is worth comparing the systems in the Straits and Australia, due to the close resemblance cited by Nicholas.74 Indeed, similar accounts of extra and intramural activities, of teams of artisans and labor gangs, and of task work and piecework do exist in both systems. However, there appear to be categorically different definitions of penal classes. Whereas the Singapore system divided its classes by labor and did not segregate any of its prisoners, the Australian system practiced European forms of separation and association on the first and second classes. Their confinement in cells and use in labor gangs created a curious amalgam of European and colonial systems. The grading of classes in Australia was the inverse of the system in Singapore, where the third class had the most flexibility and comparable freedoms and the fourth, fifth and sixth classes were reserved for those awaiting trial, “lunatics,” and debtors, respectively.75 Class distinctions organized the prisoners both according to a temporal calendar and a geographic radius for the execution of public works. They worked under the municipality, land office, survey office, and public works departments. Within the convict lines, each class was allocated discrete quarters, wherever possible, necessitating a maze of separate categories and compartments within the body of the prison. Promotions from one class to another were prorated according to the length of sentence.76 Prisoners who displayed “uniform good behavior, evident contraction and industrious performance” could move vertically across these classes.77 The instrument of their mobility was their increased productivity in labor. In addition to the system of classification, a daily routine, clothing, a messing system, and a monthly muster were used to monitor the prisoners’ movements in both colonies. Such routines checked the liberties of penal laborers, since constant surveillance by prison officers was impracticable. In Singapore the daily routine was similar to the Australian one with comparable hours of work, although the prison day was longer.78 The jail bell was rung at 5 a.m. (except Sunday), when every convict rose, rolled up his blanket with the number visible, and placed his chadar or sheet in his box, which was also numbered to correspond. He was marched out to the prison yard

76

hidden hands and divided landscapes

with the men of his ward, and the roll was called by the responsible officer. Time for light food was allowed, and the convicts were then detailed to the work gangs as arranged over night. The work gangs left the prison punctually at 6 a.m., and returned at 11 a.m.; were marched out again at 1 p.m., returning at 5 p.m. At 6 p.m. a roll was again called for the 3rd, 4th and 5th classes, who were then locked up for the night. At 8 p.m. there was another roll call for those who had the privilege, and then all were seen to their wards, and all wards and gates were locked by 9 p.m., when strict silence reigned throughout the prison.79

Whereas classification and daily routines individuated prisoners in this manner, the penal diet regrouped them as collectives, differentiating between Europeans (fish, beef or pork, even turtle) and natives (fish for Malays and Indians and pork for Chinese).80 Tobacco, bread, tea, and sugar were relative luxuries, measured out according to the race or class of prisoner. Caste-based dietary restrictions proved advantageous to the Indian prisoners, who were permitted to cook for themselves in separate cook rooms. They were provided with cooking pots (three each) and “subsistence money” for rations (Rs. 1 per month for the first to third classes), whereas rice, dhal (lentils), vegetables, salt fish, and salt, oil/ghee81 or pork fat, and condiments were supplied.82 The purchase of provisions for food preparation was the only microeconomy officially conceded to prisoners. If the food supplied by the government anticipated and fixed the different racial categories, then clothing was used to establish a different penal hierarchy. The second, third, and sixth classes received ten yards of unbleached long cloth, about forty inches wide, whereas the fourth and fifth classes were uniformly clothed in working suits of a coarse, dark-colored cloth.83 As observed by Anderson, the introduction of uniform clothing denied caste and religious distinctions and was resisted in India, where the penal tattoo was sufficient to identify convicts.84 In the Straits, uniformity was achieved in the lower classes with degrees of ambiguity occurring further up in the penal hierarchy with greater levels of freedom. There was a jail pattern jacket for the second and third classes, and the clothing for the fourth and fifth classes was marked with the prisoner’s number and letters C J (convict jail).85 Notable exceptions to this uniform were the turbans or beards permitted to particular ethnic groups and the exemption of the top three classes from regulation clothing. Belts and sashes for the petty officers and artificers, insignia of distinction, were made in the jail. In fact, photographs of the different classes of colonial prisoners in Singapore best illustrate their regimentation through clothing.86 Similar military undertones persisted in the management of convicts. During the monthly muster at the central jail, the roll was called and deaths, diseases,

the colonial prison

77

and escapes were duly noted. The prisoners paraded with their clothing and blankets (a “kumblie” or woolen blanket and a half piece of American sheeting each) and any possessions in excess of the defined quota were confiscated.87 By regulation, each convict kept the clothing and provisions provided by the penal system in a box made by them for this purpose.88 Prison regulations for transportees were reviewed in the following years: 1825, Bencoolen Rules; 1827, Penang Rules; 1843–1845, Butterworth Rules; 1860, Rules by Shaw and McNair; Rules and Regulations in 1868–1869; and a report on the Straits System in 1872 (the latter two being related to the end of transportation). This suggests an emphasis on penal management. In India, following the prison disciplinary committee of 1836, which responded to a disturbance in the Alipur jail,89 committees were held in 1864, 1877, 1889, 1892, and 1919–1920, and prison manuals were published throughout the 1870s. In short, reviews and reforms, which examined penal classes, punishments, labor, and dietary regimes, were implemented in almost every decade.90 Whereas the strictly regimented and rationalized life projected in prison reports conjured up the image of an impeccably run institution, the dispersal of prisoners throughout the island, their close association with one another, and the lack of official surveillance continuously undermined the penal regime.91 European residents frequently accused convicts of neglecting their labor and complained that convicts were indulging in “nightly florics” with tom-toms and music and were charging two doits92 for those who sought access to their “nightly revels.”93 Residents also observed, “Often during the working hours the coolies are to be seen fishing in the ditches instead of cleaning them,” that convicts and especially females “were better clad than their less dishonest, free neighbors,” and that the free messing system, which did not restrict the penal diet, gave the convicts the appearance of being well-fed, in fact that they reared dogs and goats on the leftovers.94 The criticisms raised by the European residents posited the Straits prison system against Euro-American equivalents. In European prisons, uniform systems of labor, diet, dress, and confinement were introduced as integral to the system of punishment. The careful calibration of these various activities throughout the prisoner’s routine was intended to induce reform through sufferance. Unlike in the Andamans, where work was meant to both demean and reform the prisoner, in the Straits, conversely, extreme measures were considered debilitating to the convict’s morale and apt to diminish his or her capacity to perform labor. As long as a productive labor force was needed for urban construction, regulations that prioritized the disciplining of the convicts were held in abeyance. Although prisoners were organized according to race, class, cultural practices, sentence, and punishment in a social structure at least as complex as the caste system they

78

hidden hands and divided landscapes

had abandoned, this too like the caste system was subordinate to labor, not to penal discipline. Reform was also quite unlikely under these conditions. A more rigid spatial solution proved to be the next option.

The Civil Jail The introduction of permanent custodial facilities such as gaols (old English spelling of jail) was largely an attribute of changes to the colonial political regimes during the middle to late nineteenth century. Consequently, colonial governments came to be identified through their penal facilities: Rangoon and Insein Central Gaols in British Burma (1850–1880s, 1892), Bilibid Gaol in the Spanish Philippines (1847, 1865) and Saigon Gaol in French Indochina (1862).95 In fact, in the case of both Rangoon and Saigon, jails were among the first institutions introduced to these colonial cities. Similarly, the jail, the pauper hospital, the police station, and the courthouse were the only substantial public buildings recorded in early Singapore.96 George Earl, a colonial traveler, described “a square white building erected in a swamp at the back of the town,” originally built as a poorhouse, which was used as a jail in 1827.97 In short, these four institutions appeared to be related and interchangeable facilities in terms of their design. However, they were neither cellular nor panoptic in their internal organization. Variations on cellular panoptic models were experimented with in Algeria, India, and Latin America, whereas in some British colonies like Egypt, rectangular four-story buildings evenly divided between cellular and communal accommodation, very similar to Indian and English models, were introduced.98 In these buildings, axial or cruciform plans and symmetrical divisions often replicated the ecclesiastical tradition from which institutions were derived and reflected the neo-Palladian aesthetic that was beginning to influence colonial architecture. Prisons were also graduated under a two- or three-tiered structure, which determined the scale of buildings, reserving city prisons for long-term convictions and prisons in regional centers or district jails for short-term detentions. A third tier was often established for those awaiting trial or sentenced to less than three months.99 Similar distinctions can be traced in the evolution of penal facilities across the three Straits Settlements, with Singapore acting as the urban center. Places of confinement were first introduced to the Straits due to increases in the local penal population and the subsequent need for surveillance.100 Both the growing numbers of migrants in the colony and the expansion of the excise farm economy contributed to these increases. In the police lockups the police acted as jailers and lived in thannas close to the premises, while the jailer had quarters within the civil jail.101

the colonial prison

79

The first civil jail or Her Majesty’s Jail in Singapore was a two-story building constructed during the 1830s at Macao and South Bridge Roads and later used as the central police station.102 Its successor was the civil jail on Pearl’s Hill, a brick and mortar building with a pitched roof, located next to the military cantonment. The first experiments with penal segregation are evident in an 1848 plan, which shows “proposed alterations” to accommodate different categories of prisoners in the Pearl’s Hill jail. The two-story jail building, shaped like a cross and entered at its head, was located centrally in a walled enclosure. Inside it, a narrow central corridor with an internal staircase divided each floor into ten outward-facing rooms. On the ground floor, each room opened out into an adjacent yard. In an early effort at panoptic control, the jailer’s rooms were located at the center of the building at the junction of the cross. He would watch over both European and native criminals, including debtors, felons, and capital criminals, but excluding ordinary transportees (women were yet to be interred).103 Transported political prisoners were the exception and were housed in the civil jail under a special military guard (see chapter 5).104 During this early period, the civil jail at Pearl’s Hill was simply divided by racial categories of European and native, black and white, organized according to different convictions. It was an institutional embodiment of the dual city outside its walls. The graduation of these different penal categories within a single structure can be read in the proportions of prison yards associated with their respective rooms and tenants. As penal numbers and priorities shifted, this original penal model separated into its several categories and was enumerated by individual buildings. Race, class, conviction, penal process, and types of labor assigned all became valid categories for producing the ideal penal environment. The classification and categorization that was being imposed on the prisoner’s body was thereby manifested in plural physical forms. The evolution of the penal model in the Straits must be read across all three settlements in order to understand developments in penal policy. We find that the symmetrical structures, typically divided by gender or by crime in Europe, were being used in the colonies for quite different purposes.105 The original prison building used in Melaka was described in 1851 as a doubled story house, containing four rooms with an upper and lower verandah. Each room was capable of accommodating 20 people or 80 in all. There was a clean and dry courtyard, attached to it, with a long tile covered range of workshops, an attap roofed saw pit, tiled cook room and privy, and well of good water, all within the precinct of the establishment.106

Figure 7. Her Majesty’s Jail, Singapore, 1848, detailed plan and photograph (site plan [above left], based on town plan by S. Narayanen, in IOR, X/10178, British Library; detailed plan [above right], based on IOR, India, Judicial, N43, 22, March 1848, British Library [redrawn by author]; photograph, FCO Collection).

the colonial prison

81

A more substantial jail in brick and mortar was built in 1860 and located at Bandar Hilir at quite a distance from the city center. It was a T-shaped, two-story structure with a walkway down its length, centrally placed in a rectangular site. The building spanned three horizontal divisions across the site, which separated convicted prisoners, those awaiting trial, and Europeans, dividing them equally into two wards apiece.107 A total of six wards with their respective yard spaces were generated thus in a reflected plan. The services for each ward, such as latrines, wash rooms, wells, and cook houses, were located separately at the far end of the respective enclosures. The jailer was housed above the European section at one end of the site and the debtors, divided into Europeans, natives, and women, were housed in the upper level. Whereas the Melaka civil jail divided inmates into European and native, segregation was also determined according to the prisoner’s relative stage within the penal process, whether convicted or awaiting trial. Due to the absence of a supreme court in Melaka, the jail had to act as a holding facility for prisoners awaiting hearings in Penang or Singapore. The lack of ethnic or gender distinctions, while pragmatic (cost-effective), is also noteworthy, suggesting, perhaps, the difficulties involved in segregating a population of mixed ethnicity. However, the lack of women’s quarters proved problematic when Eppagey Christiana, of “a dogged disposition,” was transported from Ceylon to Melaka in 1859. She was compelled to live among men and required both a guard and cook to wait on her if punished with solitary confinement.108 Christiana exerted such a strain on the Melaka penal establishment that she was moved to Singapore in six weeks. Comparatively, the divisions in the Penang civil jail were quite different. Built on Gaol Road in 1849, Penang jail occupied a triangulated site, which was bifurcated between the civil jail and the house of correction.109 The long rectangular prison building that crossed this central division comprised two large apartments, each 73' x 20' with accommodation for seventy-three prisoners.110 Although classified as the “untried criminals’ ward” and the “sentenced criminals’ ward,” they were in fact occupied by various categories of prisoners. Cook houses, privies, and individual cook rooms were likewise located across the center of the site and dissected by the central wall. The prison forecourt, which occupied the base of the triangular site, housed the cells for recalcitrant or condemned criminals and provided a common social space for the penal community. The Penang jail was neither suited for segregation by race, crime, or gender, nor was its proposed divisions ever maintained. The jailer was soon displaced from his room (adjoining the outer end of the building) to a cell in the guardhouse by a group of “more” respectable European debtors. A Spaniard who occupied his rooms for many years was said to have led “a comparatively comfortable life surrounded by his wife and family and with his furniture and musical

Figure 8. Colonial jail (top), Bandar Hilir, Melaka, 1872 (plan [bottom], based on sketch plan in PRO CO 273/56, UK: National Archives, Kew [redrawn by author]; photograph, author, 2002).

the colonial prison

83

instruments.”111 The eight-and-a-half-foot verandah, which wrapped around each building, was occupied by “less” respectable European debtors and women displaced from their cells in the guardroom. In fact, the verandahs could accommodate up to eighty-nine debtors and their cots and possessions. After 1851, due to their increasing numbers, women were given a separate ward including a ward for female mental patients.112 Convicts in the Penang jail included males (Europeans, Anglo-Indians, Chinese, Malays, Chulias, Buneahs, Bengalis, and Parsees) and females (Anglo-Indians, Chinese, Malays, and Chulias), while debtors included all of the above races plus Burmese and Arabians.113 Transportees who were not living in lines or commands were evidently included in their number. With convicts from all communities represented in it, the Penang jail proved as eclectic as George Town, but lacked its ordering grid. Both the Melaka and Penang jails were a fair reflection of a hybrid colonial society where transportees mingled easily with local prisoners. Similarly, the prisons produced in these two settlements were amalgams of civil jails for colonial prisoners/convicts and the house of correction for local offenders. The Singapore prison, however, was an aggregate of buildings and extremely divided.

The Convict Jail The prison that evolved gradually over the presidency years is an apt metaphor for the nature of government during that period. The push and pull of India on the colony and competition between the three settlements resulted in a slow and haphazard accumulation of power. By the 1860s the expansion of institutions and the gradual incorporation of bureaucratic procedures solidified into a complex colonial landscape that was fashioned through a thriving industrial economy. A number of hospitals and asylums such as the mental asylum, the leper hospital, and the hospital for paupers augmented the penal landscape in each of the three Straits Settlements, apart from the prison itself, enabling a network of promotions and suspensions across institutional structures for both officials and inmates. As discussed so far, the early jails in the Straits Settlements were entirely different from contemporaneous European penitentiaries, resembling instead the axial plans and aggregative complexes of an earlier period. They did not follow the radial plan of the total institution with its panoptic watchtower. Instead, we find a building constructed with brick and mortar with either a clay tile or attap roof, which resembled other colonial buildings in the region. Verandahs of the type used in the Penang jail were borrowed from bungalow architecture. The separation of services such as kitchens and bathhouses was typical of local architecture

84

hidden hands and divided landscapes

Figure 9. Colonial jail (right), Penang 1872 (plan [opposite], based on PRO CO 273/56, UK: National Archives, Kew [redrawn by author]; photograph, author, 2000).

and proved a pragmatic solution for the tropical context of the prisons. The prisons deviated from the familiar building stock in the scale at which they were built and the numbers for which they catered. In each of the three settlements, the prison was the largest of its public institutions. Since the architecture of the prisons undoubtedly drew on Anglo-Indian models, it is worth making a comparison with India. In India, jails had been built for over half a century, from the 1840s to the 1870s, and by 1877 there were twenty-six central jails that incorporated EuroAmerican design features.114 They typically had a central tower with radiating wings, high perimeter walls, cells for solitary confinement, exercise yards, workshops, and separate accommodations for different penal classes. The Allahabad jail (1840) had forty separate cells and the new jail in Agra (1849) had twentyfive subdivisions.115 In contrast, the district jails such as Honoré in Kanara and Coimbatore Gaol were single-story barrack-type buildings with tiled roofs and perimeter walls where internal partitions separated classes of prisoners (under trial prisoners, females, lunatics, and debtors).116 Ceylon, which followed a pattern similar to India, had twenty-three jails in 1865, the most elaborate being

the colonial prison

85

those in Colombo, Kandy, and Trincomalee, with Colombo’s Welikada Jail the largest, having 167 cells.117 The number of occupants in this jail, however, was 297 prisoners, of which 195 were black males, 25 were white males, and 9 were black women. In short, the number of cells was no indication of the segregation of individual prisoners in these examples. Ceylon, like India, separated its civil and criminal prisoners in a divided prison complex and had workshops for intramural labor and hospital facilities within its walls. Melaka and Penang jails resembled the district jails in India and Ceylon, whereas Singapore produced a variation of this type, modeled specifically for transportees: the convict jail. The spatial evolution of the prisons in India, Ceylon, and the Straits can be read as parallel developments. Arnold defines three phases for the Indian penal system, which bear comparison with the Straits system, namely, an early period from 1790 to the 1850s when the prison was poorly managed and maintained, a period of systematic discipline and jail construction from the 1850s to the 1890s, followed by the rise of colonial criminology, the cessation of transportation, and the emergence of anticolonial movements in the period from the 1890s to the Second World War.118 The first two periods, which overlap with

86

hidden hands and divided landscapes

penal transportation, are corroborated in the Straits with some exceptions. The shift from the first to the second period in India was identified by an internalization of labor and the change from extramural to intramural industries in 1838.119 This change was a response to the need to contain the penal population and limit its association with their supporters outside the prison walls. Castebased divisions reinforced by penal messing practices had similarly forged social solidarities within the prison, necessitating a stricter internal penal regime. In the Straits, where transportation removed the prisoner from caste-based influences and located him or her in a racially different context, such considerations were never paramount. The Straits penal system easily expanded to accommodate both kinds of labor, with no resultant restrictions on mobility. The Indian example, moreover, did not produce a new industrial workforce since many of the prisoners were likely to return to cultivation. In the newly emergent urban environments of the Straits, an industrious and urban workforce could be and was easily absorbed into the local population. Australian penal examples, discussed by James Kerr, are similarly instruc120 tive. The first generation of log and clay buildings were short-lived and were replaced with standard masonry jails according to the “army plan”: a transverse central passage flanked by dormitories each in turn flanked by a row of cells at the two ends of the building.121 A far more sophisticated design came with the employment by Governor Lachlan Macquarie of the architect Francis Greenway, who applied eighteenth-century institutional models to the Hyde Park Barracks (1817–1819) and the Paramatta Female Factory (1818). The provision for ward accommodation and the Palladian symmetry of forms adhered to in this period precluded further divisions by class, although there were efforts at separating the sexes. These early Australian examples were the only ones similar in design to those adopted in Singapore and India, because by the 1830s and 1840s radially organized cell blocks were being introduced in the Sydney and Paramatta jails, in Port Phillip Gaol, and on Norfolk Island.122 Once prisoners were segregated spatially by class, the Australian prison system diverged from that of the Straits. Another significant difference was in the inclusion of a jail library and chapel, the latter sometimes placed at the center of a radial plan, as in the example of the Darlinghurst Gaol (1885).123 When, with increasing numbers of transportees, it became necessary to build a second jail in Singapore, the Straits government selected a marshy site at Bras Basah Road near the rear of the European town. The advantage of the site was that building materials could be transported by water.124 G. D. Coleman, who held the posts both of superintendent of convicts and of public works, submitted the first plans for the convict jail in 1828.125 In his design, for the first time, the bisected spaces of the Penang jail plan, the convict jail, and the house

the colonial prison

87

of correction reappeared as two separate buildings with their own discrete yards and services. Not only did Coleman propose to enclose the buildings with eighteen-foot-high walls, but he also suggested that a bridge be built to connect the two enclosures. Both the walls and the bridge needed stone foundations with heavy pilasters and abutments due to the swampy soil. Coleman’s proposal gives us an indication of the numbers of prisoners that were anticipated for the future prison. The design included a dormitory with 2,084 feet of bed range for 600 men and a house of correction with 576 feet of bed range for 164 men. A hospital was to be built separately at the back of the site with its own yard and a bed range of 150 feet. Windows were designed at ground level on one face and seven feet high on the opposite face to ensure cross-ventilation. Screens were designed to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. The complex also included two overseers’ houses, a guard house, a buffalo shed for fifty buffalo, sleeping places for a hundred men attending buffalo, and two ranges of cook rooms, for an estimated total of $27,931.126 Coleman’s plan was initially abandoned due to the high cost of the proposal, and a brick building surrounded by an eighteen-foot-high wall was built at the furthest end of the enclosure in 1841.127 In this building, both defaulters and local prisoners faced one another across an open ward, later to be converted into a convict hospital. Trustworthy prisoners/transportees and their families lived in the style of a native village either just inside or outside the obligatory wall.128 When Lt. Colonel Man took over the Convict Department during the early 1840s, work commenced, albeit incrementally, on the convict jail. While it was estimated that it would cost Rs. 100,000 in free labor to build the prison, trained convict labor could achieve the same results for Rs. 12,000.129 By 1855 the convicts had completed two barracks for four hundred men, with iron gates, one main entrance and gateway, and new quarters for the jail sergeant. This project engaged the labor of masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, painters, double-carts, able and feeble coolies, female coolies, and boats for transporting materials. Man was in fact applying a principle advocated in one of Sir Edmund du Cane’s pamphlets, which advised that “the best system devised for the employment of convicts is that of executing large public works by means of their labour.”130 Convict industry had its original impetus in the construction of the Bras Basah jail, the largest building complex in the settlement. Whereas the civil jail on Pearl’s Hill had evolved through the dissolution of a single building, the convict jail expanded through the accumulation of structures. The hospital building was followed by the quarters for the chief warder, the solid gateway, and the guardrooms that defined one boundary of the prison enclosure. The wards for the fourth and fifth classes (prisoners in irons) and the numbers one and two wards were constructed next. They flanked the main jail yard that was

88

hidden hands and divided landscapes

used for the monthly muster. The next addition was an enclosed work yard with offices for the engineer and superintendent of convicts at its outer entrance.131 By 1860 the main jail occupied the whole of the Bras Basah site as well as an area at the foot of Government Hill reserved for buffalo sheds, the lepers ward, and mental asylum.132 The whole of this complex resembled a military barracks in both scale and architecture. Numerous temporary structures including a refractory ward, punishment cells, storerooms, filter rooms, chain room, and a receiving room for new arrivals were included in this quarter. The predominance of Indian transportees necessitated numerous cook rooms for the various castes and as many bathing places. Sheds for eating were built adjacent to the dormitories while workshops were located along the sides of each enclosure. The last addition to the jail building was a centrally placed stand, designed to hold the prison bell. The roll call for general musters was read from this position.133

Health and Hygiene The Straits prison system’s preoccupation with the health and hygiene of its inmates is apparent in the design of the convict jail, and was used to justify the prolonged use of association.134 According to Singh, such measures became necessary due to the high incidence of convict deaths during the early years.135 Between 1820 and 1824 there were 103 deaths for every 192 convicts entering the colony, and in 1859–1860 deaths exceeded the number of arrivals. Deaths were largely attributed to depression, change of climate, diet, and work regime.136 Parallels can be made with the penal system in Britain, where an era of prison reform in the 1860s saw increasing medical interest in both prisons and prisoners. The appointment of prison doctors in the decade between two prison acts for the better government (1850) and reform of convict prisons (1865) in Britain changed the focus to interactions between biology and environment. Since similar ideas of scientific criminology were not discussed in the Straits until twenty years later, the 1860s focus on penal hygiene can be regarded as a by-product of the evolving European discourse. Although colonial officials seemed disinclined to analyze the criminal character (while tending to criminalize natives in more general terms), they engaged in transforming the punitive environment. Racist perceptions of the inferior intelligence of Asians undoubtedly influenced the continued focus on the criminal’s body rather than the criminal mind. The new wards in the convict jail, which were 230’ x 60’ with twenty-foot-high walls, were arranged to contain four hundred inmates. The floors were laid with concrete and cemented with brick dust to maintain their cleanliness and graded to the sides so they could be washed. There were built-in sleeping platforms, raised

Figure 10. Convict jail, Singapore, 1857 (based on town plan by S. Narayanen, IOR, X/10178, British Library [drawn by author]).

90

hidden hands and divided landscapes

three feet at the head and two feet nine inches at the foot, which were coated with coal tar as a deodorizer. Both ridge ventilation and ground ventilation were incorporated into the structure, while barred windows ensured a current of air throughout the entire building. Four detached night urinals with double spring doors, spit boxes, and a separate building for day latrines ensured a rigorous system of sanitation. Dry earth systems were used for deodorizing and disposal of waste matter.137 In short, the new wards in the convict jail set critical standards for implementing a system of association and managing the increasing numbers of prisoners lodged in the heart of the European town. Consequently, and in the interest of hygiene, the convict burial ground was relocated from a site at the base of Government House Hill (formerly Locks Hill) to a location beyond Kampung Gelam on the Tannah Merah Road, near Kallang Bridge.138 The transposition of the colonial discourse on sanitation onto the native populations toward the end of the nineteenth century, discussed by Yeoh, can be seen as originating in these initial experiments.139 Unlike in India, hospitals remained outside colonial interest during this period, demarcated for a different medical regime based on civil and commercial interests (see chapter 4). In fact, the jails rather than the hospitals may be identified as the initial and idealized sites of colonial social engineering through health and hygiene, its objective undoubtedly being the creation of a healthy workforce. For example, the Moule dry earth system for latrines, believed to have been invented in Singapore by Rev. Henry Moule during his residence there from 1840 to 1847, was utilized in prison buildings but not in the civilian hospitals.140 Undoubtedly the cholera epidemics in Britain in 1848 and 1854 had made a lasting impression on prison administrators. Penal reports sent annually from the Straits Settlements to India documenting the health and productivity of prisoners shift during the mid-century from narrative accounts to excessive tabulations of populations and numbers, in terms of health and productivity. The expense of running the establishment and the savings accrued through penal labor were constantly calibrated against the numbers entering or leaving the prison hospital. Age, gender, sending station, and crime, the personal details that identified prisoners in the early years, were gradually subsumed by numerical data, and segregation and separation entered the prison via the prison hospital and the ward for Europeans. The new ward for Europeans (1860) was the only building in the penal system that resembled the European penal model.141 A two-storied cellular building for fifty-two prisoners, it had 7’ x 12’ 6” cells that opened into a central hall, with a gallery running around it.142 Services—two staircases, four bathrooms, and eight latrines—were incorporated within the building envelope, an unusual feature for a colonial prison, intended perhaps to conceal the nakedness and bodily functions of Europeans. Although adapted to the tropics, the building

the colonial prison

91

rigorously maintained European standards of sanitation, with clerestory openings above each cell and barred ventilation openings of 5’ 6”x 1’ at either end, immediately under the ceiling and up to 2’ 6” above floor level. The building had superior materials and finishes, such as syriah lath foundations of mangrove piling, cement tiles in the floor and in the arches, and roof pan tiles on hardwood framing.143 Its construction demonstrated the relative privilege of European prisoners and the constant fear of tropical diseases. The convict hospital, a building divided into three contiguous wards, was located at the narrow end of the site and was the first “native” space to be separated in its own compound.144 Patients in the convict hospital partook of the same daily fare as the rest of the prisoners but were serviced by a separate cook house and bathing facilities. The transmarine ward for transportees was 82’ x 59’ x 18’ (length, width, and height) and could accommodate forty beds, although the daily average was twenty-eight patients. Detached privies and a small bathroom were available for the patients although they also bathed in the communal wells.145 In the central ward, each man was afforded 2,409 cubic feet by an arrangement of twelve beds set ten feet apart from one another.146 A four- to five-foot passageway, narrower than in penal dormitories, ran through the center of each ward. Staff for the hospital included the colonial surgeon, the apothecary, and seven convict attendants (one attendant to every ten patients), who treated patients with fevers, diseases of the lungs, stomach and bowels, rheumatic infections, abscesses, ulcers, and accidents and injuries. In fact, according to McNair, these were largely diseases resulting from working in jungle areas, exposure to monsoonal weather, and lacerations caused by sustained use of fetters.147 Indeed numerous incidents of feigned diseases or “malingering” recorded by McNair suggest the continuing link between health and labor in the minds of administrators. The hospital reports are less convincing. Admittedly, there was a reduction of hospital admissions from 2,139 to 1,047 in the period between 1850–1851 and 1863, with 943 patients discharged, which suggests the success of the new facility in one respect.148 It was successful in sending patients back to labor. There were only three cases of cholera in 1863 compared with thirty-seven in 1850, a considerable improvement, directly attributable to improved hygiene. However, the drop in deaths from sixty-six to fifty-five over a ten-year period suggests an increase in the ratio of deaths to admissions. Five years later, in 1868, admissions had halved to 531 patients with 468 discharged, but at thirtyone casualties the ratio had not changed.149 McNair’s defense was that a number of old convicts were dying off, a perennial problem with life-sentence prisoners.150 The medical discourse in the colony and the prison remain mute on this point. Minor discrepancies in the perception and record of the medical regime were ignored in favor of improving hygiene in

92

hidden hands and divided landscapes

the hospital as the most critical issue. Indeed, the threats posed by typhoid and cholera epidemics, already prevalent outside the jail, were very real. Association, collective labor, and labor mobility provided a fertile terrain for contagion and collective casualties, and this was the prison administration’s major concern. The hospital’s drainage and latrine systems were consequently subject to various innovations, contemporaneous or even ahead of their introduction in Britain.151 Dr. Mouat, the inspector general of jails, Bengal, commented in 1865: The scrupulous cleanliness, perfect plan of conservancy, excellent order, well regulated system of labor and punishments, and the high standard of health attained are not surpassed in any other well-regulated institution of the same kind that I am acquainted with in Europe or Asia. . . . In many important points of internal economy and discipline, Singapore can fairly lay claim to being Primus in Indis in the adoption and practical working of principles that are generally accepted as sound and correct.152

Arguments for health and sanitation, exaggerated in this manner, further veiled the colonial jail’s primary failing, the abeyance of individual reform. In order to achieve this deception and maintain arguments for the system of association—critical for the labor regime—penal conditions had to be exemplary. The provision of individual cells, an expensive investment in materials and labor, was confined to Europeans who could not risk being physically or socially contaminated through association with natives. Consequently, the Singapore jail proved exemplary in its ability to withstand contagious diseases, a reputation that was maintained until the late 1870s, when punitive diets (not penal conditions) led to malnutrition and high mortality rates. Sanitation was the ultimate mechanism in a system bent on disciplining the penal body. An important distinction needs to be made regarding the prisons in the Straits when compared with their contemporaries in Burma and India.153 The discourse on hygiene and designs for healthy bodies, described in Straits penal reports, superseded any attention given to sustained medical experimentation. This intimate connection between the prison’s physical environment, climate, and penal labor was not as evident in neighboring British colonies, barring perhaps Ceylon. James and Nancy Duncan’s initial work on this subject suggests that “notions of race and tropical climate undermined the universal model of prison management” in Ceylon.154 However, the colonial preoccupation with climate-based diseases, which was central to Ceylon’s plantation economy, was not as pronounced in urban Singapore, or, we might argue, it had a different urban and spatial focus. Singapore’s penal superintendents were mostly military men with expertise as architects and engineers, not members of the medical

the colonial prison

93

service, and they focused on developing the arenas within their expertise. More importantly, Singapore’s penal and civilian or military medical complexes were never interdependent, although they shared common spatial types and disciplinary regimes. While such differences are partly attributable to the nature of a penal colony, in terms of its smaller population, urban environment, island geography, and dependence on labor, we need to be mindful of the distinct penal environments that emerged.

Conclusion By 1860 the convict jail in Singapore had grown into a penal complex with separate establishments for categorizing race, crime, gender, health, and penal class. A ward for women, a ward for Europeans, and a house of correction for local prisoners surrounded the hospital building in a common compound, although maintaining their separate structures. The arrangement of buildings and the relationships between spaces clearly articulated the various types of prisoners housed in each facility and the several penal categories combined within the complex. Separate buildings housed Indian transportees, convict officers, Hong Kong convicts, women, mental patients, local Chinese and Malay felons, Europeans, and invalids, and each building had its own yard, bathhouse, and cook houses. The convict jail for transportees, the house of correction, and the building for Europeans contained the largest numbers of prisoners. As the convict jail expanded into a carceral facility through their own labor, the convicts are said to have observed that “an open kampung or village had become a closed cage.”155 Indeed, the convict jail, when compared with its precedents, was the most divided penal model in the Straits, so far. It was soon replicated in Penang, Butterworth, and Melaka, and combined both convict lines and the house of correction. Not only were the ethnically segregated settler categories replicated within the prison walls, but they were also managed through a complex division of labor. By collaborating with the penal project, prisoners had unwittingly subjected themselves to a physical order immanent in the colonial penal system. The disciplinary regime imposed on convicts had eventually translated into an equally divided institutional landscape. Because coercion was permissible, the colonial prison (more so than the colonial city) had initiated experiments in social engineering and supported the expansion of colonial power. During the first four decades of the Straits Settlements, the Straits government invented and essentialized new social categories that would facilitate the control of the convict population and would gradually filter down into the settler society. It erased potentially hybrid cultural solidarities

94

hidden hands and divided landscapes

and imposed artificial ones that suited its own economic rationale. The composite systems of governmentality imposed on transportees in the Straits were aimed at emasculating them politically, thus achieving the docility intended by the disciplinary regime. The benefit to the convicts, it was argued, was reform through labor.

CHAPTE R 4

Hidden Hands

Labor as travail originally defined the limits placed on individual freedoms. The labor of a serf for a lord or the labor of women in childbirth suggests the burden of “labor.” Industry, on the other hand, had a productive connotation. Raymond Williams argues that during the Industrial Revolution in England, the word “industry” changed in use from that of a human attribute to a description of an institution.1 Adam Smith articulated this change as a field of open competition that was self-regulating and guided by a related morality, the hidden hand of capital.2 The pairing of morality and industry would recur in discussions of labor by Utilitarians who saw its reformative potential. Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon was in fact designed after the factory system for work routines of repetitive, detailed labor.3 In using Smith’s term for its title, this chapter proposes that certain concealed forms of preindustrial labor made capitalist industrialization possible. It additionally suggests that labor goes unacknowledged and uncompensated in the colonial context.4 While theories of idleness, the Protestant work ethic, and the criminalization of rural immigrants and urban poor underwrite the history of labor coercion in Europe, in the colonies these same criteria were radicalized by the operation of colonial power. Whereas the division of labor in industrialized Europe underscored the formation of the class system, labor coercion, racialized labor, and resistance to labor aptly illustrated an equally divisive colonial encounter. A brief review of the imperatives of penal labor policy is necessary in order to understand its evolution into a specific penal model. The following observations by the administration will serve as an introduction. The colonial government in India rationalized labor as a reformatory practice under the belief that by “progressively diminishing labor, gradually removing fetters, entrusting [the convict] with superintendence of others and such like marks of favor . . . the prisoner [would] gradually return to the reciprocal duties of society.”5 95

96

hidden hands and divided landscapes

Stamford Raffles argued, as was proven in the case of Benkulen, that prisoners would augment the population of settlement colonies. He recommended “freeing such men as conduct themselves well from the obligation of service, and permitting them to settle in the place and resume the privileges of citizenship.”6 Raffles also observed that a convict “no sooner marries and forms a small settlement than he becomes a kind of colonist, and if allowed to follow his inclinations he seldom feels inclined to return to his country.”7 The Straits government anticipated that the convicts would reform and be readily absorbed into the local population. This belief was reiterated in reformative discourses during the 1860s by individuals like Herbert Spencer in Britain, who attacked the separate and silent systems. His views were fertilized by and disseminated in the colonial penal system; for example, McNair quotes Spencer’s recommendation of “decreased restraints and increased self dependence,” articulated in “Prison-Ethics.”8 Spencer argued that while coercion may have been necessary in unenlightened or semibarbarous societies, its use on transportees to Australia led to atrocities on the part of the authorities amounting to criminal behavior. He advocated a system of absolute morality that restrained criminal behavior and determined the correct levels of coercion that were permissible.9 An interesting postscript to Spencer’s account was the inclusion of several quotations from Dr. F. J. Mouat, inspector general of gaols in Lower Bengal. Upon visiting an exhibition of jail manufactures in Calcutta in 1856, Mouat reiterated his belief that every prisoner sentenced to labour should be made to repay to the State the whole cost of his punishment in gaol; . . . and that prisons should be made, as much as possible, schools of industry, as combining, more completely than can be effected by any other system, the punishment of the offender, with the protection of society.10

Writing on the three leading systems of prison discipline at that time, Mouat further observed, The oldest is, that a prison should be rendered a terror to evil doers by the infliction of as much pain as can be inflicted, without direct injury to health or risk to life. The second plan is a graduated system of punishment, from which the direct infliction of pain is eliminated, and the prisoner is allowed to work his way to freedom and mitigation of sentence, by mere good conduct in jail. The third, and in my humble judgment the best, is to convert every prison into a school of industry, labour being used as an instrument of punishment, discipline, and reformation.11

hidden hands

97

In pamphlets and articles published during the late nineteenth century, Mouat acknowledged the influence of Spencer and described the Singapore prison as superior to anything on the continent of India.12 Indeed, remuneration in the form of wages for warders and peons and allowances for food are evident in the Straits penal system from its very inception, and convicts were paid at two-thirds the rate of free labor (whereas in England it was half the rate).13 The advocacy of the industrial prison by Spencer sets the stage for the further divergence of colonial and metropolitan systems of penal reform, but it also confirms the centrality of the prison to systems of citizenship, which were paramount in the minds of colonial administrators. In fact Spencer’s “Ethics” is all about how equitable citizenship is impacted by criminal behavior. Since Australia is the colony foremost in his discussion, “race” does not muddy his equation. However, the colonial management of race is central to the labor system in Singapore. Therefore, although this chapter focuses on the issue of industrial labor and the prison as a school for industry, an underlying discourse on race and citizenship inform it. Singapore’s “industrial” prison is thus located at the intersection of race and penal reform, invoking other more troubling discourses of colonial labor policy. Its successes must be viewed in relation to these more iniquitous examples. Writing on Africa, Florence Bernault describes penal labor as a transitional form of slave labor, where the use of convicts not only blurred the divisions between public and private realms but “induced a structural confusion” between free labor and penal labor.14 In her view, the system masked the divide between the space of punishment (the prison) and the space of sovereignty (outside the prison). Furnivall, writing on Burma, provides a different interpretation.15 Due to the introduction of Indian prisoners to Burma, the penal settlement created an immense barrier between the British and the Burmese. It drove out free labor, raised the rate of labor, and stigmatized outdoor labor. In fact, in Furnivall’s opinion, this was one of many negative consequences of penal policy. The transfer of loyalties of district headmen from the community to the government, with attendant forms of policing, and the introduction of immigrants with alien cultures and ideas so weakened existing social bonds that it led to increases in crime.16 In fact, the convicts brought there for public works spent their time building prisons. They were also given preferential treatment; for example, when in the early period there were no bathing facilities within the jails, the public was debarred from using public wells if they were needed by convicts.17 In both these examples, which contrast sharply with the optimistic projections of Stamford Raffles, penal labor played a divisive role in the colony or destabilized its labor economy, empowering the colonial government. This is particularly true of colonies where a large indigenous or migrant population was already

98

hidden hands and divided landscapes

extant, and less so, we may imagine, in colonies established for their penal function such as Benkulen, the Andamans, or to some extent Australia. Where labor was racialized, as in the Straits, these tensions were likely to be extreme. Not surprisingly, the more troubling aspects of penal labor history, of the racially different “hands” that underwrote urban forms of colonial capitalism, remained well-hidden in accounts of the Straits penal system. Individuals are translated and tabulated into numerical sequences calculated into each and every public project. This chapter intends to bring this data into a narrative format (see Appendices H and I). It hopes to look squarely at the amalgamation of race and labor in the colonial penal environment and to use labor in introducing analyses of colonial racial strategies implicit in the previous two chapters. In doing so, this chapter will also allow us to draw our most important conclusions regarding the role of the prison in the Straits and the three distinctive penal conditions it ultimately produced. This chapter additionally studies how the opportunities provided through the prison system were contrary to European ideas of punishment and were the source of far greater social divisions that fashioned the terms of citizenship and captivity in the colonial context. It evaluates how each of the three prisons that evolved in the Straits was adapted to suit the colonial labor regime and how the labor system was used to reorganize the prison and public institutions. The prison model central to this chapter is the convict jail at Bras Basah Road, which had expanded until it resembled an industrial factory by the 1860s. Although taking its name from the institution for confinement that had evolved in nineteenth-century Europe, the accommodation of a racially different group of transportees in Singapore paved a different path of institutional evolution. The history of this prison offers us an alternative narrative of a powerful engine indispensable to the machinery of government and responsible for its infrastructure and services. It opens up a different interpretation of an urban landscape, as viewed through labor.

The Landscape through Labor In the decade from 1850 to 1860, the “penal landscape” gradually extended across the city of Singapore, producing an industrial economy that engaged with the material life of its citizens. The dispersal throughout the settlement of the prisoners servicing this landscape enables us to imagine its urban history as an aggregate of specific spatial and temporal activities conducted by them. Meanwhile, accounts of public works undertaken in each settlement, annually and by convicts, suggest its wider geography: Melaka needing country roads and bridges, Penang needing earth fill in its marshlands, and Singapore needing

hidden hands

99

extensive sea walls and fortifications.18 These accounts do not differ greatly from those of convict labor in India or India’s other penal settlements, where extramural labor was the lot of convicts. Convicts were a common sight on colonial roads, a humiliation intended as a deterrent. After 1832, when Singapore began to demand the bulk of convict labor, the Bras Basah prison at the town center was conceived as the station from which both manpower and labor was distributed.19 Among the first tasks awaiting the first batch of transportees in 1825 was the construction of the commercial square on the south bank of the river.20 In 1833 they reclaimed twenty-eight acres of marsh, which were then intersected by roads and appropriated for European settlement and subsequent taxation.21 At the sea front, granite walls hardened the city edge and shaped piers, lighthouses, and fortifications. Fort Fullerton was built with rocks blasted by the convicts at the mouth of the Singapore River.22 Commands were set up in the countryside to facilitate road work. The first roads were cut along the sea front (Beach Road) and across the settlement (North and South Bridge Roads) through the Chinese and Malay villages, opening them up to the colonial gaze and subsequent policing. The first country roads toward Bukit Timah, the New Harbor, Thompson, Serangoon, and Budoo similarly opened up the island to European plantations.23 By 1852 a tight mesh of roads articulated the central plain and the authority of the European grid.24 Roadways across the island enabled the subsequent alienation of property by the land office and survey departments, where convicts were employed as chainmen, survey assistants, and land measurers.25 It was through the survey of land that the larger plan of the city grid, as taxable properties, became apparent.26 Whereas roads across the hilly territory had deferred to its topography, the grid and the boundary claimed the land with authority, ignoring its undulations. The linear expansion of road works from district to district was likewise ushered in by drains, bridges, embankments, and water works. In 1854 Tanglin, Thompson, Toa Payoh, Siglap, Kallang, and Bukit Timah roads fingered out into the undulating landscape and into the jungle interior.27 Described as “communications,” the road network carved up the virgin territory for colonial rationalization. Convicts proved useful for penetrating the landscape and dealing with any form of resistance. Escapes among convicts were also most frequent during work in the country districts. As a minority of a different ethnicity, convicts were ideal for clearing land, alienating property, or removing squatters. Company convicts had already cut a road through the sultan’s domain and removed Malay graves (mentioned in chapter 2).28 In 1860 convicts were used to carve up the sea beach into lots for rental.29 Certain caste groups from India (Shikarrees) were sent out in teams to eliminate snakes and tigers before clearing the jungle.30 For convicts, surveying and road

100

hidden hands and divided landscapes

works provided both freedom and opportunity at the heels of the colonizing mission. The knowledge gained in this manner proved useful to Hammapah, a Kannadhi convict transported in the mid-nineteenth century, who operated as a land broker after his release from prison.31 He bought large amounts of land on the eastern side of Singapore and trained his son Somapah in the same trade. Somapah Village in Upper Serangoon Road belonged to this family and Somapah submitted building plans in 1884 and 1897.32

The Municipality While land surveys and roads had incrementally carved up large geographic territories, convicts reinscribed these spaces by journeying all over the island. The penal system spread its communications out into the surrounding landscape, and the prison at the town center distributed manpower and labor. The temporal map of the city was likewise produced by convicts, who set out to conduct the daily conservancy of the town through municipal work. In fact, the municipal limits reflected the availability of their labor and up to the 1870s did not exceed a two- to two-and-a-half mile radius from the Singapore River.33 By 1855 road gangs, sent out between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., were cleaning 147 miles of streets within the municipal area of Singapore, and rubbish carts were sent out three times a day with a bell attached.34 The noonday gun fired from Fort Canning (according to which the population set their watches) depended on a signal made by a convict at the government office. “Time” on the settlement, which depended entirely on his punctuality, suffered frequent delays.35 Signals given to ships entering the harbor suffered a similar fate.36 As part of their daily duties, convicts cleaned and tended the city, its esplanade, parks, cemeteries, race course, and botanical garden as well as the trees and the nurseries for young seedlings, which were located at convict and police stations.37 They killed stray dogs on the first three days of every month and removed dead bodies from public highways.38 Women and invalids of the sixth class were the grass cutters and town sweepers. As municipal firefighters, convicts serviced and manned the fire engines, and as police peons (housed in their respective stations) they frequently made local arrests and chaperoned those arrested to the magistrates’ offices.39 When employed as municipal labor on civil and military projects, the convicts worked in the European and native residential areas outside the town center.40 By 1870 these laborers numbered 356 out of 2,754 prisoners in three settlements. In the public streets and spaces of the European town, the European colonial citizenry was shadowed by their antithesis, the convict community, of whom it was observed “one may live for months without knowing that there are any convicts.”41 The reinscription of the rational

hidden hands

101

grid by the illegitimate offspring of the colonial project additionally inverted the native hierarchy, empowering transported criminals (see Appendix J). Far from being humiliated or victimized by natives, the convicts, who crossed both ethnic and spatial barriers, were dreaded as agents and informers of colonial authorities.42 The appearance of convicts in the country districts provoked both excitement and fear among the villagers.43 Deviant activities that were deemed to be degrading to Europeans were conducted indirectly through prisoners. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, whenever there was rioting among the immigrant communities, convicts were used to pursue and disperse rioters (see chapter 6).44 As mentioned previously, fifty able-bodied convicts acted as coolies during the Naning expedition.45 Convict peons frequently made arrests of pirates and robbers.46 Penal status afforded convicts various opportunities to become contractors, caretakers, police, and scavengers. On their release, a large number, who had formerly been ryots (farmers), found jobs as herdsmen and carried on a trade in milk for the community. Some would purchase a hack, palanquin, or bullock cart with their savings and act as hack syces or cart drivers.47 Several enlisted into the police or continued their positions as orderlies in public departments.48 As observed in 1884, “to this day many of the released convicts are living in Singapore very useful men in the place—cart owners, milk sellers, road contractors and so on: many of them comfortably off.”49

The Industrial Landscape Once the colonial administration had investigated the resources of the land and set the convicts to digging clay, quarrying stone, breaking coral, or felling timber, convict outposts were located even further afield. In the quarries and brick fields at the fringes of the city, the convicts were intimately engaged in the very material units of its production. The periphery of the convict landscape was scattered with subsidiary buildings belonging to the central prison, and convict boatmen and cart men transported men and materials daily to and fro, carried food, and facilitated communications between them. According to the colonial records, the convict brick field in Serangoon Road in Singapore was situated at an inlet from the ocean and near an excellent bed of clay, which provided ample water for brick production.50 A palm grove was close at hand where the convicts could “roam without restraint when their work was over.”51 Sheds, kilns, pug mills, molding tables, and all the appliances necessary for handmade bricks were provided for, and a large dormitory surrounded by a stout fence was built for 120 convicts, of all classes, who were employed in this work.

102

hidden hands and divided landscapes

The brick kiln account of 1855–1858 shows us that brick and tile makers, able coolies, double carts, eight-cyan boats, eleven-cyan boats, firewood men, masons, carpenters, and blacksmiths were employed at Serangoon in brick manufacture.52 Although they originally used the slop molding method, a brickmaking machine was introduced in 1859 to enable industrial levels of production.53 In 1851 the convicts made 418,300 bricks, 249,700 tiles, and a total of 90,000 square tiles for use in public works.54 At the agricultural exhibition in Agra in 1867, the superintendent was awarded a silver medal for the Singapore prison’s exhibit, which included specimens of bricks, tiles, drainpipes of all sizes, and stable flooring bricks, all made by convict labor.55 In addition to brick making, convicts culled coral from reefs and atolls for making cement and lime for plaster. They broke the coral, kiln fired it, mixed it with clay (into small balls), and fired it once, after which it was ground into fine cement powder by female convicts.56 Mortar was made at each building site. At Pulau Ubin Island, east of Singapore, which was acquired in 1822, large fluted boulders of crystallized granite were blasted and then fired or split with hammers and chisels by convicts.57 Convict bullock carts and boats brought these materials to sawmills and kilns closer to the town, where they were transformed into standardized units of production. The small-scale manufacture of construction tools, sieves, wheelbarrows, and baskets supported industrial manufacture, while the temporal and spatial displacement of industrial sites functioned as extrapenal public spaces for prisoners.58 Each command in the countryside set up its own industrial workshops for carpentry or ironwork. Whereas the central prison replicated the density of a medieval city, the commands were isolated outposts of specialization. Colonial officials were constantly preoccupied with improvements to industry, and their methods were held in high regard. The Cambodian king requested a lime-making machine in 1858, and the resident of Rhio and the Dutch colonial, Siamese, and Japanese governments sent special missions to report on the convict system.59 The education of the prisoners was managed by the careful graduation of labor throughout the penal class system. The replication of units of manufacture, the standardization of products, and the deployment of machinery in independent workshops, far removed from the sites of their application, increased worker mobility and introduced them to modern systems of mass production. The industrial system in Straits prisons was replicated in other British colonial penal contexts. In Burma’s Tennaserim and Arakan provinces, convicts were employed as sawyers, brick and tile makers, potters, weavers, blacksmiths, brass founders, and domestic servants.60 In Ceylon they were employed as masons, carpenters, smiths, sawers, stonecutters, shoemakers, coopers, painters,

hidden hands

103

Figure 11. Mortar Mill, Government House, Singapore (McNair, PTOW, plate xvii, facing p. 101).

and glaziers, and they were involved in jail manufacture.61 In 1844 in Madras, there were more convicts on the roads than in the jails.62 By the latter half of the nineteenth century, as extramural activities were gradually curtailed, penal labor in India was confined to introverted environments, and jails were turned into “schools of industry.” In fact, argues Arnold, “[i]f elsewhere in the industrial age the factory resembled the prison, in India the prison largely anticipated the factory.”63 As a result of their involution, Indian prisons became major manufactories and generated considerable incomes by supplying materials for the police, army, and government departments. Remunerative industry was introduced successfully in 1843.64 Visitors were impressed “less by the penal effect of this labour than by the ‘purely industrial nature of the institution,’” observes Arnold. 65 In fact, by the early 1880s private entrepreneurs appealed to the government to restrict the use of steam-powered machinery in the prison because, being subsidized by the government, it disadvantaged private enterprise. Other penal environments proved equally enterprising. For example, labor camps, extramural industries, and prison manufactures were reproduced in both Algeria and Egypt, differing from one another only in one respect. The prison in Algeria under French rule was run according to the enterprise system by private contractors, while in Egypt it was overseen by a Directorate of

104

hidden hands and divided landscapes

Prison Industries.66 Unlike in the Straits, neither of these prisons was linked to the Public Works Department. In fact, due to the predominantly agricultural economies of these countries, cheap unskilled labor had a higher demand and agricultural penitentiaries were more effective. These observations also hold true for India, which did not produce a disciplined labor force envisioned by early reformers. The majority of prisoners in India and in Ceylon were cultivators by caste and unlikely to enter the urban industrial sector upon their release. Of the 302,274 prisoners who entered the jails of the lower provinces, Bengal, between 1861 and 1865, 206,974 were agriculturalists.67 This alone would differentiate penal industry in India from that in the Singapore prison. Prisoners in Singapore were a far more complex group made up of cultivators from India as well as rural migrants and urban poor. As they approached the end of their sentences and obtained tickets of leave they were likely to seize opportunities to remain on the island. They frequently entered the urban industrial sector, where they undoubtedly fulfilled the predictions of Stamford Raffles by contributing to the colonial economy. They had, for all intents and purposes, been educated into a form of useful metropolitan subjectivity, or so it seemed.

The Racialized Prison The narrative of compliant and productive labor and equitable penal enterprise, indeed the argument for the reformative capacity of the penal labor regime, fall apart on the issue of race. In fact, the implications of racial identification are fairly complex when reproduced in a microenvironment within an already racialized urban context. In the discussion of penal practices in the previous chapter, it became evident that colonial ideas of race had placed colonial prisoners outside European penal ideology, instead identifying them in terms of labor productivity. Transportees, moreover, often constituted a racially differentiated labor force within a broader colonial economy. However, these distinctions were some of many categories that were being imposed on the colonial population, and in the early period penal facilities were not divided by race. Both Melaka and Penang jails displayed levels of social hybridity that were absent from the Singapore prison but could nevertheless be traced to the categories of the convict jail at Bras Basah. Although the colonial government’s racial policies were not overtly repressive, racial distinctions were similarly distinguishable in the divided landscape of Singapore town. It is important therefore to compare racial divisions in colonial Singapore with those of other colonial penal environments. In Africa, argues Bernault, “the endurance of white rule depended on asserting social and political divides between colonizers and Africans, rather than

hidden hands

105

crafting integrative ruling strategies . . . [and] . . . colonial prisons encouraged the preservation of social antagonisms vital to white hegemony.”68 In the Burmese prison, Indian convict warders recruited from the United Provinces were placed over indigenous Burmese prisoners, writes Ian Brown, and racial hostility, poor discipline, corruption, and rioting directed against Indians was the result.69 Peter Zinoman observes that the continuation of Sino-Vietnamese carceral traditions, the evolution of the prison from prisoner of war camps, and the belief that non-Europeans were innately incorrigible and therefore beyond reform was due to the essentially racist orientation of the French colonial penal regime.70 Progressive disciplinary practices were not introduced into the colonial prison in Indochina. The situation in the Straits was never so extreme. Reform and rehabilitation was a recurring theme in prison disciplinary committees (albeit often rhetorical), and disciplinary practices had in fact multiplied within the Singapore prison. Ian Brown argues that British Burma and the American Philippines displayed a similar “humanitarian awareness,” particularly in the early twentieth century, when reformers went so far as to question whether incarceration could reform.71 In the Singapore prison, penal labor was organized to provide opportunities for self-improvement and was self-governed to some degree. However, reform and self-government never instilled the kind of political subjectivity evident in comparable prisons such as Bilbid Prison or Iwahig Penal Colony, under the Americans in the Philippines, where republican values were being introduced to penal populations.72 The pedagogical project of the Singapore prison never crossed the threshold between body and mind to produce a reflective, individual conscience. It was limited by racist notions of the capability of convicts and the need to maintain European superiority at all times. Unlike in Europe, the mobility of the individual convict in Singapore was contained within the identity of the collective, and a racialized penal labor system was directed toward achieving this end. Such abstract strategies of containment are not uncommon in penal history. Long before cellular environments were introduced to the colonial prison system, it was segregated in a far more discriminatory manner through race. In fact, colonial prisons were reflections of dual cities and dual economies where Europeans and natives occupied separate spaces under very different material conditions. Europeans invariably received preferential treatment and were exempt from forced labor. Regarded as modern and intelligent individuals, they were placed within the ambit of reformative practice. There are many examples that demonstrate that the racial divide within the colonial prison was a manifestation of colonial power and that cultural divisions invariably superseded criminal ones.

106

hidden hands and divided landscapes

Arnold quotes the 1837 Indian Penal Code as saying that it would be undesirable to allow Indians to see “Englishmen of the worst description, placed in the most degrading situations, stigmatized by courts of justice, and engaged in the ignominious labour of a gaol.”73 Europeans in India had separate quarters and even separate jails in hill stations such as Ootacamund.74 Similarly, in Africa black and white prisoners were segregated, writes Bernault.75 There were inferior quarters for Africans, who were deindividualized into collectives and accommodated in collective chambers. She further describes how judicial inequalities remained the norm throughout the colonial period, with racial divides invented to justify discriminatory forms of punishment. Similarly, the Code de l’Indigénat, the native penal code in Algeria, was used to differentiate between French subjects (Arab-Muslims) and citizens (Europeans and Algerian Jews), while Lambese, the cellular prison built in 1852, practiced a double segregation: inmates were not only held in its five hundred cells but also segregated by race.76 Furthermore, Europeans were encouraged to practice a trade whereas Arab inmates were given hard labor. In Ceylon, “white” prisoners (European and Burgher) were differentiated from “black” prisoners (Sinhalese, Tamils, and Moor) by the provision of wooden bedsteads and a protein-rich diet.77 The three new prisons in Singapore proved to be equally divided, but to different ends. In the years between 1853 and 1860, the convict jail in Singapore had grown to resemble a medieval walled city, located at the rear of the European town grid and lodged between its urban commercial streets and widely spread country houses. As the institution housing the largest concentration of labor in the colony, it had become the foremost site for experiments with industrial-scale manufacturing. As the industrial landscape expanded, it provoked the dissolution of the penal complex into three distinct buildings on separate sites, with their center at the convict jail at Bras Basah. By the late 1850s, following the several permutations described in the previous chapter, the Straits system had three distinct categories of prisons that to some degree reflected the racial divisions of the inmate population. Despite its organization by race, there is no doubting that the true significance of the Straits penal system lies in its labor regime, and it is fitting that the prisons that emerged should be evaluated accordingly. Unlike in Burma and India, where superintendents were often medical men, the Straits prison favored colonial engineers and surveyors.78 The penal hierarchy, the disciplinary system, and the inmate population were all governed by the imperatives of labor necessary for making the settlement a success. Whereas penal processes were incidental to far more pressing institutional concerns in Burma or India, such as the military or hospitals, the Straits prison was conceived and managed

Figure 12. The three prisons in Singapore (right) during the 1860s (based on 1878 plan by McNair, PRO CO 78/2425.2, National Archives, Kew [drawn by author]) and gate of convict jail (below), Singapore (McNair, PTOW, plate xi, facing p. 78).

108

hidden hands and divided landscapes

for colonial public works. In short, although penal superintendents were not trained or experienced in prison administration, they were certainly competent in executing complex infrastructure and architectural works. It was not surprising therefore that the Straits prisons mirrored and reproduced the colonial division of labor. The racialization of this system and its intersection with the plural social model invariably added to its potency. The first and smallest of the prisons in the Straits was the civil jail (Her Majesty’s Jail), an outgrowth of the police jails and holding cells, where European convicts and recalcitrant seamen were interred for short terms. It was reminiscent of the Elizabethan Bridewell, which although established to eliminate vagrancy, provided wealthy prisoners with separate apartments. In the civil jail in Singapore, apartments were reserved for Europeans. The second prison in the Straits, the house of correction, was also an outgrowth of the Bridewell but closer to the eighteenth-century workhouse and house of industry, reserved in the Straits for local (immigrant), Chinese, Malay, and Indian prisoners, debtors, and prisoners awaiting their sentences. It resembled the system of silent association and was designed for confinement in dormitory-type spaces. The third prison, which we have discussed extensively, the convict jail, was thus rid of two of its previous functions and reserved almost exclusively for transportees. It was wholly engaged in penal industry and developed a labor regime where prisoners of the lower orders of society were put to work. Consequently, precedents for the system that evolved in the convict jail can be found in the Elizabethan Bridewell, the College of Industry, and the workhouses of the early eighteenth century where men might learn “the habits of industry.”79 Changes to the system in the Straits were not wholly unrelated to those occurring in Britain. Following the Prison Act of 1865 the local jails and houses of correction in Britain had been amalgamated as local correctional facilities, distinct from the centralized convict jails.80 While this same separation is evident in the Straits, the persistence of the civil jail implied that notions of criminality and racial difference demanded a separate facility for Europeans. Significantly, the labor regimes in the three penal facilities in the Straits differed from one another and were graduated according to the relative entitlements of their inmate populations. Europeans in the civil jail were not expected to work. In the house of correction, like its European counterpart, prisoners from among the immigrant population suffered hard but useless labor, whereas convicts in the convict jail were the most productive. Consequently, particular ideas of subjectivity, liberty, and racial entitlements were communicated to the colonized population through the penal labor system. A curious distinction in the Singapore prison system is noteworthy at this point. The racial organization of these three models was subordinated to an

hidden hands

109

evolving relationship between citizenship and labor. Unlike the black-and-white divisions of other colonial examples in India or Ceylon, the Singapore case provides a muddy conflation of ethnic categories that are graduated by objectives that reconfigure racial identity. The convict jail was an anomaly, unrelated to the European tradition of civil jails and houses of correction that suggested perhaps a penal settlement manifested in architectural form. It was in fact the punitive city, par excellence. Whereas civil jails, criminal prisons, and houses of correction were intended for the confinement of local prisoners, the convict jail in the Straits was fashioned specifically for alien transportees. Due to its population being many times larger than that of its fellow institutions, the convict jail dominated the penal landscape. To understand its relationship to contemporaneous penal models we must study each of the three prisons more closely.

The Civil Jail The commodious and well-constructed quarters in the civil jail (H. M. Jail) offered Europeans a share of the material economy that was flourishing outside the prison. Spatial privileges were offered because, first, white men could not be treated as “natives” without “imminent danger to their health and lives,” and second, they needed to be incarcerated and kept in complete isolation.81 The “climate” prevented their employment with other transmarine convicts.82 In this way the separate system was established in the civil jail to protect and segregate European prisoners from Asians. In Singapore by the 1860s, the civil jail at Pearl’s Hill (discussed in chapter 3) was converted exclusively for Europeans who did not work or cook their own food. David P. Thoms, a European convicted of murder who arrived in Singapore in 1855, received a weekly diet of chicken, pork, fish, and tobacco in addition to rice, dhal, and other rations.83 Thoms was confined in an elaborate apartment and provided a wardrobe tailored to suit. His quarters included a separate room, furnished with one pallet bed with mattress, pillow, and blanket and one small deal table, two chairs, one commode, and one stand, basin, and jug. He was given crockery and utensils: two mugs, two plates, one spoon, knife, and fork, one kettle, one teapot, and three chutties (cooking pots), and he was given clothing: two sets of jackets and trousers of drill, replaced every six months, four common shirts, and one pair of shoes.84 The special treatment of European prisoners was due to the governor’s belief that “it was never intended that the sight of a fellow country man, working in irons on the public roads, should be exhibited to the people of the island.” Moreover, “food, clothing and work” as a native convict, “would prove if not early death, at all events immediate admission into the hospital.”85 According to the resident councilor, “they could

110

hidden hands and divided landscapes

Figure 13. Singapore, criminal prison (Singapore National History Museum Collection).

not live on the same food, nor be without bedsteads and clothing, [they needed] a separate space for them as in dormitories . . . or solitary cells.”86 European convicts were both dreaded additions to the colony as well as an important marker of relative colonial status.87 While Indian bandits or murderers were regarded as relatively harmless and wandered abroad, their European equivalents were thought to be cunning, intelligent, and dangerous characters. They were consequently kept in strict confinement in sanitized and relatively luxurious quarters. However, this logic altered considerably when dealing with Asian political prisoners, who were also housed in the civil jail (see chapter 5). The political prisoner was a potential subject of martyrdom leading to political insurgence and needed to be separated from natives. The prison commission of 1868 on Ceylon argued that separation was a punishment to “a thoroughly bad man,” but preserved “a better-disposed man” from contamination, giving him “time to reflect.”88 Accordingly, the rational and political mind of the civilized subject was dangerous but available for reform through confinement. Incorrigible European convicts who did not satisfy the above criteria were sent to a cellular ward for Europeans in one of the other prisons.

The House of Correction The house of correction was separated from the main body of the convict jail and was built at the eastern end of the settlement on Balestier Road, adjacent

hidden hands

111

to the hospitals located there. Very little is known of the history of this particular institution, which was relatively brief, since despite its humble beginnings, it would first displace and then consume all other forms of prisons. In 1858 a temporary building for one hundred local prisoners was erected within a perimeter wall and the prisoners constructed their prison around themselves without leaving the premises.89 The complex consisted of a new prison for three hundred natives (principally Chinese) and forty recalcitrant Europeans (serving short sentences), as well as work sheds, cook houses, hospital, and a separate ward for twenty females. A boy’s room, cook house, house for overseers, and a main gate were also added, the total costing 857 Spanish dollars with timber and attap construction.90 The house of correction was self-contained and introverted and was modeled on the European system of association. The majority of inmates were local prisoners, who could not be trusted out of the prison because of their close relationships with the immigrant settlers. Once incarcerated within its walls, they were insensible to the outer world of the settlement and underwent punishment through hard labor. The majority of inmates in the house of correction were employed in repetitive and often unproductive tasks comparable to those in European penitentiaries. Labor conducted within the enclosure included breaking stones for road metal, pounding coir for rope making, husking rice, and similar monotonous tasks, which depended on a steady supply of raw materials.91 Light labor within the walls of the enclosure was assigned toward the end of a sentence and involved making mats, walking sticks, baskets, chairs, morahs (stools), tiles, buckets, and wheelbarrows.92 Consequently, when materials were in short supply, the prisoners had no heavy work and earned a reputation of evading labor. Thomas Shelford, a member of the Legislative Council who visited the house of correction in Singapore, described it as a “charitable institution for the wicked” and declared that “prisoners [were] lazily even drowsily engaged, working in association even talking together and even in some cases laughing.”93 In his opinion, the comfort and rest provided in the house of correction explained why prisoners sought twenty to thirty reconvictions. The deputy commissioner of police concurred that it was a perfect paradise to the natives of the East, in whose philosophy the greatest of human enjoyment was the “dolce far niente,” the happiness of doing nothing.94 In fact, those “who were turned out before the expiration of their sentences were perhaps considered as aggrieved rather than favored.”95 The parodying of punitive labor as leisure is familiar in the colonial record, particularly in instances where the deterrent value of hardship was extolled. In the Middle East, for example, the maxim “prison is for real men” and the nickname “Coles Hotels” for British colonial prisons illustrates this point.96 If labor was to be the instrument of reform, it had to be strictly enforced. Burma

112

hidden hands and divided landscapes

provides an extreme example of this practice where shackles and chains were used even at night until 1867 and the treadmill was used until 1900.97 However, the Singapore prison suggests quite the inverse, where the distinction between productive and unproductive labor regimes, both operating simultaneously, suggests the failure of the latter method. It was not the inefficacy of labor per se that upset penal officials reviewing Singapore’s house of correction. An unproductive prison was a direct drain on state revenue.98 The prison was seen as a lodging house where coolies could escape the industrial system, evident in the flood of voluntary recruits and recidivists.99 Transportees from the convict jail would even commit petty theft in order to enter the house of correction and so escape their labor routine.100 By doing so they fleetingly crossed the boundary from foreigner to immigrant. These boundaries were important because while Europeans remained the privileged subjects of citizenship in their separate apartments in the civil jail, local immigrants were being offered very different treatment according to graduated entitlements. As potential property owners and taxpayers and sometimes as naturalized subjects, the regional settlers were in a position both superior to the transportees and more threatening to the colonial government. The use of coercion to elicit their cooperation was next to impossible. The success of the industrial system had to be argued through the convict jail.

The Convict Jail As described so far, both the civil jail and house of correction were sites of confinement and limited or unproductive labor. In contrast, the transportees went about their daily duties quite openly. They reported periodically at the monthly muster and enjoyed unprecedented freedoms as long as they engaged in labor. Consequently, the convict jail was the least confining and yet the most successful in creating an industrial labor force. By 1860 the jail had transformed into a “house of industry” organized to train skilled labor for public works. In the convict jail, inmates could be roughly divided into three general categories according to skill levels, which placed them in a different relationship to the colonial government. The first category was negligible in terms of productivity and included women and invalids in the sixth class who made brooms and ropes and were employed on lime kilns.101 The second and least advantageous category was of unskilled/hard laborers, typically assigned to the fifth, fourth, and third classes. They worked in gangs and on roads and infrastructure works and were supervised by convict peons.102 Skilled labor, the third category, was drawn from the first, second, and third classes and was organized into an artificer corps in May 1853.103 Artisans numbered 113 from a

hidden hands

113

total of more than two thousand convicts and were trained by skilled European workmen (see Appendix K).104 The Europeans were instructed to teach the natives “economy in labour,” to read plans and sketches for complex architectural works, and to execute government buildings in a “substantial and ornamental manner.”105 Native methods were abandoned after 1857.106 The plan of the convict jail from the 1860s onwards shows its transformation from a prison into a factory. Although collective dormitories were retained in this model, it expanded to include several categories of workshops both within and attached to the prison enclosure. The most important from among these, the industrial workshops for artisans, had its own separate section.107 High walls and a guarded gateway surrounded the work yard to prevent prisoners from pilfering materials. There were shops for “carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers, wheelwrights, sawyers, stonecutters, and turners in wood and iron.”108 In one part of the yard, a machine shop was fitted with lathes, punching and shearing machines, a bolt and nut machine, a stone crusher, a band saw, and a circular saw table. Inside the main jail compound there were additional shops for tailors, weavers, rattan workers, coir and rope makers, and flag makers. The physical implosion of the Bras Basah prison into a labyrinth of industrial workshops produced an equivalent surge of industrial manufacturing. McNair observed that carpenters made all the interior fittings such as pulpits and reading desks as well as building works; coopers made buckets, tubs, and casks for storing cement; wheelwrights made carts

Figure 14. General monthly muster, Singapore convict jail (FCO Collection).

114

hidden hands and divided landscapes

and barrows; stonecutters turned out moldings, mullions, capitals, cills, steps; tailors and weavers made clothes and blankets; flag makers made and repaired flags for the department of the master attendant; and the rattan workers made chairs, baskets, and fenders for government steamers and baskets for flag staffs.109 Material produced by the artificers was valued at one-half the market rate and their labor at two-thirds of average labor.110 Labor was further categorized as “day work,” “piecework,” and “task work” to facilitate the measurement and payment of work.111 Gratuities were introduced as incentives to industry in indirect ways that never quite amounted to wages.112 Skill-based categorization replicated caste by a race-based division of labor.113 For example, Madras convicts were used on all trades requiring “energy and skill” and were appointed as stonemasons, blacksmiths, bricklayers, brick makers, and rock blasters. Bombay convicts were considered good carpenters and painters. The Burmese were used as boatmen, lime kiln burners, attap men, and rattan weavers, and the Chinese from Hong Kong were considered excellent stonemasons and carpenters.114 Sinhalese convicts (from Ceylon) and specifically Kandyan carpenters transported to Melaka came with an aptitude for skilled work.115 One Sinhalese convict, who became expert in metal turning and fitting, was said to be running a profitable business in Ceylon following his release and repatriation.116 With the introduction of a paid and skilled labor force, the government was also forced to balance profits against costs. The Singapore prison was also extremely progressive in being the first Indian jail to introduce a steam-powered sawmill and pug mill for manufacturing.117 A printing press was used in printing and bookbinding and published documents for various government departments, including the Government gazette.118 Three draftsmen under “Babajee” (Bawajee Rajaram), a convict from Bombay, “executed all the plans and working drawings for the public works.”119 In 1861 McNair learned photography and introduced it into the prison, establishing a studio where Europeans might have their portraits taken.120 The divisive character of the modern industrial method was most aptly represented when two “intelligent” convicts were taught to take mug shots of fellow prisoners. The labor system in the convict jail imposed particular divisions and hierarchies for organizing productivity and managing the mobility of prisoners. Penal classes were augmented by new categories of race-based skills and of skilled and unskilled labor. A system of remuneration generated other temporal and taskbased categories for measuring and paying labor. These divisive systems, established within the prison walls, were further consolidated in public work sites, where they intersected with the racial hierarchies of the settlement. Reinforced by an artificer corps, the government grew confident in its ability to shape its civic landscape into an arena for the display of competent authority to settlers

Figure 15. Conjectured drawing of convict jail, Singapore, 1860s–1870s (drawn by author).

116

hidden hands and divided landscapes

and to neighboring governments. Penal industry in its ideal form produced the idealized public sphere.

The Public Institutions Whereas initially private homes in the European town were used as public institutions, from the mid-century onward the increasing importance of the Straits Settlements created a demand for new and powerful symbols of colonial authority. Penang had already erected Fort Cornwallis (1804), the Government House (1793/1803), and St. George’s Church (1818) with convict labor. Similar institutions signaled Singapore’s rise to prominence toward mid-century. A civic landscape of autonomous public institutions was soon marked out around the symbolic spaces of religion and government. Comparisons with Calcutta are worth making. Partha Chatterjee observes that the government buildings introduced there in the 1870s—the high court, secretariat, post office, telegraph office, and customs house—expressed the need to maintain a specifically colonial form of power by reproducing the difference between colonial and colonized.121 As observed by Jon Lim, the Calcutta Maidan, against which these buildings were read, was replicated in the Singapore esplanade.122 Hospitals were located at a safe distance from this arena, in keeping with ideas of health and sanitation. While these institutions did not reproduce the moral or disciplinary regimes described in discussions of Euro-American institutions of that ilk, most notably in the work of Rabinow, Rothman, Hindus, and others, they imposed culturally distinct systems of modern law and governance upon “native” settlers.123 Aesthetically they embodied the hybrid third culture conceptualized by Anthony King and drew liberally from metropolitan and indigenous forms and embellishments, but nevertheless they suppressed this hybridity, reproducing it as a distinctly European style.124 In their scale and position—along the esplanade with views to the ocean and as an imposing backdrop to the Singapore River—public institutions imposed European ideas of order on the congested vernacular environments they overlooked. Such ambitions were realized, however, through hybrid construction processes. In Singapore, convict labor was used on public buildings after 1833 and gained new impetus in 1853 with the training of convict artisans. However, civil construction works throughout this early period were affected by the scarcity of money and materials until they finally came to a halt following the Indian mutiny of 1857. Once building resumed, the civic landscape of Singapore expanded considerably, generating a surge of building activity from 1859 to 1867. The building process, rather than its finished product, is often far more reflective of the colonial economy and is evident in a map of the city as viewed

hidden hands

117

Figure 16. Head Tindal Maistri and convict of the fifth class (photographs, McNair, PTOW, plate xiii, facing p. 86, and plate xv A, facing p. 90).

through labor. Several building sites were scattered throughout the town during this period and occupied the space between the central prison and its manufacturing outposts. They were serviced by peripheral industries and concentrated groups of convict labor. As temporal hubs in the industrial landscape, each project contained a micro economy for brief but intense time periods, engaging building contractors, suppliers, and convict overseers. The convicts were also frequently engaged on various buildings in maintenance, extensions, alterations, and demolitions.125 Additionally, surface work on buildings, such as whitewashing, cleaning, painting, and repairs, was frequently needed throughout the settlement. Increasingly, the public work sites became the testing grounds for modern materials and methods applied to elaborate and permanent masonry constructions. The convicts were central to this transfer of knowledge and benefited from

118

hidden hands and divided landscapes

their access to both training and methods in advance of the immigrant populations. In 1851 a number of convicts, who had completed sixteen years of residence and become eligible for tickets of leave, were hired by the Peninsular and Oriental Company as laborers, maistry bricklayers, and masons at five and nine dollars each per month. They were employed in constructing expensive and important building works.126 Three of the public buildings constructed during this period are noteworthy due to their massive scale and in their significance for the colonial system of governance. St. Andrew’s Church, the first of these buildings, replaced a church designed by G. D. Coleman (1834–1838) and was built overlooking the esplanade at the center of the settlement, located centrally to maintain European and Christian pre-eminence. The second building, the government offices at the heart of the civic area, which was originally designed for the law courts, grew to become the symbol of an increasingly centralized system of government. The third public building was the general hospital, which was banished to the outskirts of the European town where sites reserved for disease and deviance were located.

St. Andrew’s Cathedral In 1852, when Coleman’s original church, St. Andrews, was abandoned due to structural damage, numerous rumors were spread through the Chinese community (instigated by the government)127 that the European worshippers had fled the church for the courthouse to seek refuge from an infestation of evil spirits.128 Indian convicts guarding the church grounds were supposed to be decapitating trespassers to use as human sacrifices to appease the spirits.129 Such circumspection followed the displacement of religious authority with secular and legal institutions of government. The proposal for the new cathedral, which needed both to satisfy the Christian community and to impress the natives, chose to replicate the Cistercian, Gothic architecture of early England.130 St. Andrew’s Cathedral was described as “a great training school for convict artificers” that would benefit future public works.131 Coleman’s church was torn down and, employing convict carpenters, blacksmiths, stonecutters, coolies and boatmen, the building of its new foundations commenced in 1856. Scaffolding had to be set up and then removed during the stoppage of work after the mutiny, but construction recommenced in 1860.132 The resultant building was an interesting hybrid of Anglo-Indian and Victorian Gothic architecture. Its designer, Ronald MacPherson, claimed to have modeled it after Netley Abbey (1251), a Cistercian church in Hampshire, England, which had a similar Latin cross plan and simplicity of ornament. St. Andrew’s Cathedral, still extant, is

hidden hands

119

250 x 65 feet internally with nave and side aisles, or 95 feet wide with the north and south transepts, which are used as porticos.133 In the interior, the side walls of the nave are supported by rows of simple sparsely decorated arches. Models of these arches were constructed on the ground so the convicts could follow their pattern.134 Chunam plaster prepared according to a special Madras recipe was used on the interior walls and columns to produce a glossy surface resembling marble.135 The light, streaming through windows along the side aisles and into the church interior, fell onto the granite and China tile floor.136 A great arch at the northeast end of the building led into a chancel and an apse with three lancet windows in stained glass erected to the memory of Sir Stamford Raffles, General Butterworth, and Mr. Crawford.137 Through their commemoration, the European Christian community of Singapore, which subscribed to these memorials, endorsed secular government. The simple Cistercian style was best suited to the convicts’ limited skills for European-style ornamentation. The architecture, however, was modified to suit both a tropical climate and construction methods in what was recognizably an Anglo-Indian style. The entrance to the cathedral is through a porte cochere, which is plastered with lime plaster, unlike its Cistercian antecedents. Built above it is a vaulted dome with a turret in the late Gothic style of Salisbury Cathedral. Jon Lim notes that the addition of a steeple to the solid form of the church structure followed innovations in Calcutta from 1842 onward and was intended to impress the surrounding heathens.138 In his commentary on the preservation and transformation of colonial period churches in contemporary Singapore, Goh notes that the particular religious symbolism of denominational architecture had given way to a standard form, designed for a single class signification, that of European authority.139 MacPherson’s design of a tower was abandoned due to unequal subsidence during construction, and the turret was built with strong hexagonal tubes of Penang pottery, laid in mortar so that the interior resembled a honeycomb and achieved a height of 63.1 meters (207 feet).140 A strong tie-rod acted as a screw to anchor the spire to the body of the tower.141 The roof, at 22.56 meters (74 feet) high, was built with teak timber, and boy convicts had to be specially trained to cover it with slates imported from England.142 The penal industry cut its teeth on work at the St. Andrews Cathedral site, which involved carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, and stonecutters.143 Convict Appasamy, the foreman at the blacksmith’s shop, did the ironwork.144 Labor was disorganized, since the workforce included local short-sentence convicts, who lacked skills and had to be frequently replaced, and was scarce, since several public works were being carried out during the same year.145 Consequently, although the original estimate had been Rs. 120,932 (or Rs. 47,916 with convict labor), an excess of Rs. 64,000 was incurred.146 Convicts, although excluded

Figure 17. St. Andrews Cathedral, Singapore (plan [top], based on pamphlet obtained at church in 2001 [drawn by author]; photograph, McNair, PTOW, photographer Koch, plate xvi, facing p. 97, bottom).

hidden hands

121

from the church congregation, entered the premises as punkah pullers, peons, sweepers, groundkeepers, burial attendants, and church clerks.147 Bawajee Rajaram, the convict from Bombay mentioned previously, undertook all the working drawings for the cathedral.148 He was employed as tracer at the executive engineer’s office and had two other convict draftsmen working under him. He was later involved in drawings for many public and military projects. Bawajee even went on to pursue private architectural work following his release and submitted municipal drawings between 1889 and 1897 for projects, including a colonial bungalow for Mr. Louis Alfred at Devonshire Road in 1890.149 He can be considered Singapore’s first native practitioner. The notion of hybridity that is typically associated with stylistic elements, including both form and decoration, or is studied in variations to the building plan, gains an additional yet troubling impetus by acknowledging building processes. Not only were these buildings adapted to climate and materials, but they were produced by different work regimes, methods of manufacture, and knowledge bases than their European counterparts. They were divisive in their cultural imposition, their exploitation of unfree labor, and inaccessibility to native communities. They were in fact a hybrid of civic aspirations and repressive forms of authority, values that were expanded upon in Singapore’s civic center.

The Civic Center St. Andrew’s Cathedral, which was completed in 1862, gave its blessing to a host of neoclassical-style secular buildings, which included the town hall (1861), fives court, post office (converted from the old courthouse in 1864), medical store, master attendant’s quarters, and new courthouse. Cumulatively they created a civic center at the mouth of the Singapore River on the site first occupied by the Temenggong’s village and then the convict lines. The civic buildings were connected by Cavenagh Bridge (1867) to Raffles Place and the southern commercial part of the settlement.150 These monolithic institutions built with convict labor established the colony’s autonomy and strengthened its appeal for separation from India in 1867.151 The governmental systems they represented were used to rationalize the diverse population into racial categories. As observed by Goh, the columned and pedimented Palladian façades, arcades, vaulted ceilings, rotundas, and other elements effectively commemorated colonial ideology and spread its narratives of class and grandeur beyond the civic boundaries.152 The Straits Settlements came under the jurisdiction of Her Majesty’s courts with two recorders, one for Singapore and Melaka and another for Penang. Criminal justice was administered in quarter sessions.153 Turnbull observes that the executive and the judiciary often clashed during the presidency years, and the

122

hidden hands and divided landscapes

desire to reduce the power of one or the other was a constant cause of friction.154 The original courthouse, government office, and recorder’s office (1826–1827), the stages for numerous contestations, were located in a house leased from John Argyle Maxwell and designed by Coleman in a neo-Palladian style.155 The government purchased this house in 1841 and used it as a supreme court building from 1875 to 1939. Although a new courthouse was sanctioned in 1855 and eventually built in a neo-Palladian style with convict labor between 1864 and 1867, it was never used for its original purpose.156 Instead it was converted to “government offices,” which housed, virtually the entire government bureaucracy: Secretariat, Audit Office, Registration of Deeds Office, Land Office, Public Works and Medical Departments, Treasury and Stamps Office, and offices of the Colonial Engineer, the Official Assignee and the Inspector General of Police. In the center of the building on the upper floor was the legislative chamber . . . every Singaporean, in a sense passed through its doors, for the building housed the registry of births and deaths and the citizenship registry.157

The classical proportions, arcaded piano nobile, and elevated Doric pilasters presented an imposing image of centralized governmental authority as a homogeneous and self-containing monolith servicing all aspects of modern and independent government.158 Whereas the Gothic style of the church referred to its medieval religious context, the government offices were firmly rooted in the rationalized humanist world of the new, post-mutiny, governmental order. Yet this too was reinscribed through convict activity. As in the case of Bawajee, “intelligent” prisoners with specialized skills, such as writing and drafting, were given specific roles within this administrative system. Our discussion of civic institutions thus introduces yet another variable of “users,” through which we may read colonial architecture. Although native and immigrant communities were denied access to the public institutions except as plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses, or applicants within the various bureaucratic systems that were being put in place, convicts had privileges that opened up different channels of mobility. Convicts drawn from the first and second classes were appointed as orderlies, messengers, peons, or punkah pullers and traveled across the interior public landscape facilitating a network of administrative communications. In addition, every public official, such as the recorder, colonial secretary, governor, chief justice, colonial engineer, the judges, and heads of departments had two or three convict peons at their service to carry baggage and perform other temporary requisitions.159 The orderlies and messengers not only entered public buildings with equanimity but bore messages from the ad-

hidden hands

123

ministration to the officials’ private residences. The roads and public spaces that wove the settlement’s geography together were reinforced through this web of personal communications delivered by prisoners.160 Peons were supplied a uniform, hat, waist cord, belt, and plate, which they wore at whim, and worked from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. for remuneration.161 Orderlies and tindals who were employed in a supervisory capacity drew as much as nine rupees pay, with rations.162 Hospital orderlies who cared for convicts, lepers, and mental patients were included in their number. Their location, however, was at the periphery of the colonial city.

The General Hospital and Mental Asylum Apart from the prison, the hospitals and asylums were the only modern institutions that were directed at the poorer classes of the local population.163 The wealthier classes were treated at home, and some private establishments, such as the tavern, rented space for wealthy patients.164 The diseased and insane from among the poorest of all the races lived in the midst of their communities at first, in the “death houses” (hospices) in Sago Lane, until they were moved to the funeral parlors on Sago Street, “the street of the dead.”165 Writing on the evolution of the general hospital, Y. K. Lee observes that although it originated as separate buildings for European soldiers, sepoys, and paupers, by 1828 the “Singapore Infirmary” had been designated a civil establishment.166 In fact, European seamen were its most likely inmates and the government felt it should be financed by commercial establishments. Lee documents the reluctance of the community to fund medical establishments and the temporary character of buildings during this period until a cholera epidemic in 1841 forced investment in hospitals. The pauper hospital (1833–1844), on Pearl’s Hill, was built and run by private funds donated by Tan Tock Seng and Cham Chan Seng, and the seamen’s hospital (1846) was built nearby. Lee cites several reasons for the construction of the first government hospital complex (1860) at Kendang Kerbau, one mile away from the town, north of the Rocher Canal, and adjacent to the police station.167 They are: fortifications proposed for Pearl’s Hill (discussed in chapter 6), which necessitated the removal of the seamen’s hospital; the temporary requisitioning of the building by fresh troops following the mutiny; the displacement of patients to a medical store, which proved inadequate; and a second cholera epidemic. The new complex, which combined the general hospital, mental asylum, apothecary’s quarters, medical stores, and dispensary, was the first of its kind. Although both the general hospital and asylum were organized according to spatial units, calculated around the beds of patients, the hospital was arranged in wards, while the asylum was cellular. The second Tan Tock Seng pauper hospital was located

Figure 18. New courthouse/public offices, Singapore, 1868 (upper floor plan [top], based on sketch in PRO CO 273/21, UK: National Archives, Kew [drawn by author]; photograph, 1867, FCO Collection).

hidden hands

125

further away along Balestier Road, along with the hospitals for lepers and smallpox. The marshy site and the separation of the hospitals from one another was a cause for much debate.168 The hospitals were an interesting hybrid of the compact European institution and the segregated prison complex where the management of “disease” was not central to their organization. They did not serve as laboratories for experiments in colonial eugenics nor were they conceived as extensions of the military establishment, as argued by Arnold for India.169 During this period, smallpox was the only disease that warranted segregation, and convict hospitals, which were identified in reformative discourses on health and hygiene, were located within the prison walls.170 The plans of the hospitals have formal attributes which can be traced in the late nineteenth century Fresnes plan for penal institutions, where a long corridor links a series of rectangular buildings (the telephone pole).171 In the case of Singapore’s hospitals, however, the corridors were open on either side and the plan was divided by race. In the general hospital, the narrow corridors connected two parallel wings set eighty-four feet apart, which separated the Europeans from the “natives” and accommodated both sailors and police cases. The patients’ diets, which were comparable to those of the prisoners, were likewise graduated according to race.172 In the two European wards, which were 54’ x 21’ 10” x 19’ 6”, each patient was given 1,800 cubits of space by an arrangement of twelve beds each set six feet apart.173 In comparison, the wards for natives were more closely packed with fourteen beds in a space of an equivalent size, and another four wards of smaller sizes took twenty-six more patients. The mental asylum comprised four dormitories in two sizes, 54’ x 22’ x 20’ and 21’ x 22’ x 20’ with a ten-foot-wide verandah all around.174 The wards were connected to baths by covered passages, and the shower baths were supplied from a well in a contiguous apartment. Each patient was afforded 987 cubits of space and held in cells of 10’ x 10’ 6” x 12’ 6”. The cells were utilized for the control of violent mental patients that would be handcuffed and strapped to cots. Both a hospital and a female ward were within the same enclosure.175 The hospital and asylum buildings were of brick and mortar and were built on a basement elevated four feet above the ground with both roof and ridge ventilators.176 Attention to ventilation, interior temperature, and sanitation—provision of separate washrooms and bathrooms—were all essential criteria in the design of both institutions. Masonry aqueducts carrying water were a significant innovation. However, these institutions lacked the rigorous attention to sanitation and cleanliness symptomatic of the convict hospital. They were badly sited near an open sewer and were neglected and understaffed.

126

hidden hands and divided landscapes

The colonial surgeon and assistant colonial surgeon lived one mile away and visited the hospital premises daily, typically encountering patients with fevers, dysentery, venereal diseases, stabbings and woundings, accidents, and contagious diseases.177 The hospital wards were run by convict servants (one to every ten patients), who attended to them day and night, along with as few as two resident apothecaries. The mental asylum, principally for natives, was equally understaffed by one resident medical superintendent, several convict servants, and one female nurse.178 Despite the scientific rationality upon which it was designed, hospital management at the hands of convicts fell far short of the prescribed system. In Penang, in particular, where the surgeon’s services were stretched between six separate institutions and his own private practice, convicts took over the management of the hospitals.179 With no fixed regulations and no knowledge of local languages, the death rate was three times the expected norm. Unlike the hospital, the asylum was a more permanent holding facility, and the inmates were employed in gardening, keeping the compound in order, picking oakum, making baskets, drawing water, or helping in the cook house.180 A cook and two criminal assistants, who ran the Penang mental asylum, not only kept dangerous patients in stocks and locked up untrustworthy mental patients, but hired out the rest of the patients to townspeople.181 The attendants in the mental asylum in Singapore were likewise negligent, always anxious to put as many patients in one cell as possible in order “to spare themselves the trouble of pacifying the troublesome [ones].”182 The private institutions, which employed convict nurses, were not excluded from neglect despite having paying patients, and in poorhouses where patients had no alternative, the conditions were particularly bleak. In 1859 patients of the Tan Tock Seng hospital for paupers protested against the apothecary Nellthorpe, who “drank brandy and abused them and beat them.”183 However, in at least one instance, patients profited from the hospital system. Inmates of the Melaka leper hospital, which was located at the heart of town, used begging profitably by blackmailing residents into paying them to leave their premises!184 In short, the sites of disease and deviance, indeed of institutional reform, were neglected by the colonial government and subject to the ingenious schemes of convict orderlies.

Profitable Practices While peons and orderlies were considerably empowered by their location within the colonial administration, convict gardeners, syces, and domestic servants in private houses penetrated the very heart of the European community and were privy to intimate colonial relations.185 They were paid relatively high wages and trusted with property and possessions.186 Convicts of the worst

Figure 19. Mental asylum (top right) and general hospital (bottom right), Singapore, in 1869 with photograph of the hospital from the 1860s (plans, based on sketch plan in PRO CO 273/36, UK: National Archives, Kew [redrawn by author]; photograph, FCO Collection).

128

hidden hands and divided landscapes

character (murderers) were employed as cooks since they were less likely to pilfer from the stores than were those convicted of robbery.187 In 1829 Penang gentlemen employed a total of eighty convicts from all classes.188 In 1867 the Indian government received $800 in revenue from the hire of convicts by private individuals.189 However, convicts were best placed in the first penal class under the ticket of leave (TOL) system, when they sought remunerated private employment for half their workday. In 1868 in Singapore, there were 414 TOL convicts out of 1,302 transported prisoners.190 TOL convicts who were close to completing their sentences often married female convicts, supported themselves and their families, and acquired property and personal possessions. There was no doubt that the colonial prison system, although based on racialized labor relations, had offered its inmates numerous material opportunities. These material opportunities temporarily veiled the divisions of the colonial order. As observed by Satadru Sen, the Indian subject, located as he (or she) was at the margins of a colonial economy with a repressive racial ideology, could not be expected to identify himself fully with the regime.191 He could, however, enter into a political relationship with the state that placed him in social and economic positions that were open to policing, and he could be made to police others. The penal system in India and the Andamans tried “to create new social classes and categories, new patterns of work and residence and new bases of economic and political collaboration.”192 “Colonial law was explicitly related to a new political order and a new vision of the relationship between state and society,” writes Sen.193 A similar impulse was evident in the Straits. More importantly, across the three penal models that had evolved within the Straits system, race and labor were graduated to produce three very different relationships with the state for Europeans, immigrants, and transportees.

Conclusion When contextualized within a system of labor, the penal models of nineteenth-century Singapore raise questions regarding the particular restraints applied to colonial subjecthood. Property was ultimately embodied in the person of the naturalized British subject or the “colonial citizen,” yet citizenship was inversely proportionate to degrees of physical freedom. Colonial citizenship was in fact the more inhibited site when compared with the productivity and physical mobility of Indian convict status. Europeans and immigrant settler communities were contained within a city grid in their cellular institutions or their native enclaves, under the panoptic scrutiny of government. Ironically, those who were legitimately categorized as British subjects had the least physical freedom.

hidden hands

129

In the case of Indian transportees, non-wage labor forced a form of disembodiment from the conditions of citizenship and property and marked the distance between citizen and non-citizen. In fact, transportees were offered relative freedoms due to their disassociation from citizenship, which was measured against numerous systemic prohibitions. Their lack of civil status increased their mobility and produced alternative forms of urban subjectivity and knowledge through the scope and scale of their collective labor. The prison proved to be a productive site for the very least category of its inmate population and enabled them to learn industrial practices outside colonial material culture. The city that was constructed through convict labor was equally dynamic. The convicts moved spatially and temporally across colonial space, marking it through activities that caused skilled and unskilled labor to intersect dialogically with private lives and public services. Their tasks took them to every part of the settlement, across both geographical and racial barriers in ways that would seem impossible to the native populations. At each stage of a plural system of rewards and promotions, access to the material world convicts were fashioning would be managed by colonial race- and class-based covenants and negotiated against received ideas on penal systems. The penal division of labor differentiated Europeans from natives and immigrant settlers from Indian transportees. By the late nineteenth century the colonial prison in Singapore had imploded into a complex industrial landscape that maximized the labor of a captive population. It had rid itself of its civil and corrective facilities in which labor was not a priority and become the embodiment of the colonial economy. However, its success as flag bearer for the colonial industrial system was dependent on labor coercion. The salvation of the penal subject through industrial labor was equally a narrative of pacification. In this manner, the colonial prison used industrial practices and the negation of caste, class, and family to divide and to individuate Indian convicts, fashioning them into ideal workers. However, the system was not a perfect one. Its strength was based on the mobility and association of convicts, which brought with it a host of problems. Increasingly, penal management proved difficult because an alternative knowledge of the settlement had been learned by convicts through labor.

CHAPTE R 5

The Perils of Association

Far from enumerating the successes of the modern state, penal histories of colonial societies highlight the limits of a system where expansionist prerogatives, poor financial resources, and corruption overwrote the objectives of reform. In fact, as argued by Dikötter and Brown, they expose the Eurocentric limits of theories that study the evolution of systems of punishment as illustrative of processes of rationalization, namely in the work of Foucault and Weber.1 These authors also point out that prisoners were not passive subjects of a “great disciplining project”; evasion, resistance, recidivism, alternative cultures, and anticolonial politics were in fact strengthened by incarceration. Studies of the prison outside Europe often reveal that the customary order or daily negotiations by inmates, their complicity or resistance to penal processes, and the acknowledged porosity of penal boundaries disabled penal regimes just as social exclusion, racialized labor, and colonial hierarchies were enabled by them.2 Subaltern histories have emerged to challenge the overwhelming successes documented in administrative reports and offer us alternative views of the colonial penal system. Whereas colonial officials and European residents focused on problems of morality and reform, on the mental and moral incapacity of the native offender, the colonial prisoner showed scant concern for their reformative zeal. The ethical value of labor was not impressed on his or her consciousness. However, the true nature of the relationship between colonizer and colonized in the Straits prison system escapes our scrutiny because of the poor level of literacy amongst many Indian prisoners.3 The voices we hear are largely of the literate or miscreant offenders. Yet they do reveal a truth, worthy of our attention, that the weakest point in the system was its economy. This chapter will explore this issue further. The colonial economy was highly dependent on the management of land and capital, and, as discussed previously, wage labor, contractual obligations, physical property, and industrial manufacture were all inherent parts of a capitalist 130

the perils of association

131

material culture that was idealized both against and through the penal system. The following observation regarding the obligations of citizenship in the Straits, beyond upholding the law and the public good, are revealing: The citizen of a free country can and ought to be taught . . . the nature and rights of property the relation of capital to labour and of the employer to the employed. The laws of the production of wealth—and the ethics of commerce.4

Without this knowledge, it was stated, there was a greater likelihood of sedition, conspiracy, revolution, and misery, pauperism, and degeneracy. Although prisoners contributed significantly to nineteenth-century economic life, they were not considered bona fide practitioners.5 Governed by a faraway authority and immediate necessities, the penal system, like the liberal economy around it, depended on self-regulation. Its success was managed not through reform, but by incentives and rewards that were given or taken away from individual prisoners. The greatest incentive was of physical mobility and its reward was the opportunity for self-employment. The previous chapter described this system at its best, the way the colonial administration might have liked us to imagine it. The system undoubtedly generated opportunities for the ordinary cultivator, laborer, or bandit transported from India, as outlined in a series of short vignettes with which McNair concludes his book.6 In contrast, this chapter illustrates a few brief histories of individuals who did not conform to the system. Before examining the political economy of the penal system more closely, it is important to revisit the roots of “reform through labor.” Although originating in the early houses of correction in Europe, this ideology was transferred to the convict jail and applied to Indian transportees rather than immigrant settlers. Only transportees, from among the penal categories described so far, engaged in a comparable economy where industry was paramount and reform was measured by productivity. We are reminded by Thomas Markus of the frontispiece of Beccaria’s third edition of On Crimes and Punishments, where Minerva is depicted gazing with horror at the severed head of a criminal in the hands of an executioner and with approval at the instruments of labor.7 The focus of this chapter is not so much on labor but on the instruments of production and the circulation of raw materials and manufactured goods within the penal economy. It looks at how prisoners manipulated the material culture that was otherwise denied to them. It also looks closely at the social networks that were shaped within the prison and their intersection with the outside world. We find that many of these encounters are mediated by the exchange of property and by monetary transactions, which directly challenged penal regulations.

132

hidden hands and divided landscapes

The disciplinary action taken by the penal authorities against individual prisoners unmasks colonial attitudes to property that informed the ideology of labor reform. Petitions, letters home, and reports on punishments are primary sources for such disclosures. Prisoners also sought every opportunity to exploit the penal labor system. The appointing of government contracts, the system of supply and manufacture, seemed to have been regularly abused by convict peons and tindals.8 Acquisition or confiscation of property, taxation, and inventorization were additionally at the heart of most anticolonial disturbances. Throughout the nineteenth century anticolonial rebellions accompanied the expansion of colonial territory while resistance to the alienation of land, property, and capital unwittingly provided fresh penal recruits. The accounts in this chapter raise critical questions regarding the penal system, using intimate details of inmate experience. This chapter has its basis in methodologies that scrutinize the colonial record to piece together the non-elite histories of colonized subjects.9 Its sources are fragmented, largely based on oral interviews and efforts at deconstructing colonial archives. In matching the irate reports of colonial officials with letters and petitions from prisoners, the content shifts to dialogical encounters between individual convicts and colonial authority and looks closely at customary practices from the point of view of the prisoners engaged in them. The main objective, however, is to challenge the assumption that penal labor was necessarily reformative.

A Reluctance to Labor The rules regarding the internal economy and management of the prisons, which were introduced to the Straits in 1827 after the system in Benkulen, included three directives regarding material property: item 7, the work tools would be collected for safekeeping every night and the prisoners searched for concealed weapons; item 26, the prisoners were prohibited from any kind of transaction, monetary or otherwise, with officers or jailers; and item 28, the bags of prisoners would be examined weekly for instruments and any excess money “more than sufficient for ordinary and proper maintenance” would be removed and kept in deposit.10 However, the attitude toward property acquired by convicts with life sentences was purposely ambiguous, as is evident in disputes before the court of judicature on, first, “whether convicts maintained by government have the right of devising property,” or, second, “whether the government in such cases were not the legal heirs of such convicts.”11 It was felt that except in cases where convicts supported themselves, the “government has at least the right of reimbursing

the perils of association

133

themselves these expenses, the payment of which enabled the parties to acquire it.” Whereas such ambiguities typically advantaged the government, which was dealing with a largely illiterate penal population, it became an issue with prisoners of a different social class. Class was the primary criterion through which to test the policy of “reform through labor.” Since indigenous laws had always privileged prisoners of high status such as Brahmins or educated prisoners, the British took it upon themselves to apply their laws equally upon every social class excepting Europeans. The objective was to humiliate all classes of colonial prisoners before their peers.12 Tikiri Banda, an educated prisoner from Ceylon and the son of a royal minister, consequently found himself assigned to manual labor and, following several acts of insubordination, subject to corporal punishment. Petitions attributed to him in the colonial record reveal that violence and humiliation were contained within the reformative objective. When the 1848 insurrection in Ceylon was reported, after a two-year delay, in the Illustrated London News, it carried several illustrations including that of a “Kandyan chief” and minister to the late king of Kandy (Sri Vikrama Raja Simha) by the name of Dunuwille.13 The minister, whose actual name was Milleva, was the disava or chief of the Vellassa, Godapola, and Bintanne areas in Ceylon’s highlands. Milleva had died as a prisoner in Colombo Fort in 1821 while serving a sentence of treachery related to an earlier anticolonial rebellion in 1818. His eldest son Loku Banda, who lived with his father throughout the sentence, was sent to an English school, Queen’s College in Colombo, and acquired sufficient fluency in the language to work as a court interpreter. In 1834 Loku Banda drew up a memorial on the grievances of the Kandyan chiefs and presented it to the governor, Sir Robert William Horton, for submission to King William IV. He was brought to trial for treason in 1835 but was acquitted.14 Following this notoriety the family took on their mother’s name, Dunuwille, and Loku Banda was appointed the first superintendent of police of the central province. He was active in quelling the 1848 rebellion in Matale. The 1848 rebellion, which was attributed to transformations in the country due to the rapid growth of the coffee industry, was described as “an incident in the adjustment of the colony to more modern social and economic conditions.”15 Lord Torrington had been dispatched as governor to Ceylon in 1846 with instructions to introduce a series of taxes and a recommendation from Lord John Russell to read Adam Smith during his voyage. Although the rebellion was in response to his new direct taxes—a dog tax, a shop license, a poll tax, a gun tax, and a road ordinance (enforcing six days of statutory labor, commutable for money, on the roads)—Torrington believed that it was the disassociation of government from responsibility for the religion and religious lands, termed

134

hidden hands and divided landscapes

the “Buddhist question,” that provoked mass unrest.16 K. M. de Silva observes, however, that the people in Kandyan areas viewed it as an attempt to revive the traditional corvée system “in a most obnoxious form—compulsory labour for road construction—for the benefit of the planters.”17 A “pretender” to the throne accrued a large following and marched boldly on several towns and villages in July 1848. The suppression of the rebellion involved the imposition of martial law, the confiscation of the property of those arrested, and acts of atrocity by British troops that were to prove fatal to the career of the governor. More than one hundred natives were put to death during the rebellion and a considerable amount of property was confiscated. Not a single European was killed. An inquiry followed. Misappropriation of property during extended martial law provoked accusations against the military, which had looted and confiscated property in the wake of the fleeing villagers.18 The government disposed of all perishable goods, reimbursed their own expenses, and took custody of whatever remained, to be reclaimed by application by their rightful owners. The objective of this strategy was to identify the rebels through claims upon their property, then confiscate it as punishment. Proclamations to this effect were made by Captain A. Watson threatening death to any person (servants or relatives) who concealed the possessions of the arrested rebels. The Malay soldiers under his authority were said to have been involved in looting and plundering. In short, individual property was central to political negotiations, was the object of violence, and was the mode of executing punishment meted out to rebellious colonial subjects. While Loku Banda was assisting in quelling the rebellion, his younger brother Tikiri Banda, who was practicing as a lawyer, came to the aid of the government’s victims—the disenfranchised elite. Tikiri had a reputation for being impetuous and on two previous occasions had flouted both local superstitions and colonial authority. He had rescued a young woman sent forward to be sacrificed to the spirit of the mountain, Bahirava Kanda, in the face of local custom.19 Similarly, his horse had bolted through the ribbon just as colonial officials prepared to open the Peradeniya Bridge.20 In 1848, Tikiri was engaged in defending one of the individuals cited in a proclamation and was accused later of forging its content.21 By the time this case was heard, however, he had been convicted of a different crime, of forging the will of Molligoda Kumarihamy, and was transported to Melaka along with several of the convicted rebels.22 In the Melaka prison, Tikiri Banda claimed to have interviewed “the pretender,” Gongalegoda Banda, prior to his death, and stated his intention to publish a work for public information.23 He thus demonstrated that he could exert influence over other Kandyan transportees. An impertinent letter addressed to A. G. Green, the governor of Welikada Prison in Colombo, expressed

the perils of association

135

his sense of the excellence of the system of prison discipline and hard labor carried on at Wellicadde gaol; and that in consequence of what he, Tickery Banda had seen while in confinement there, he had been able in his capacity of overseer or clerk of works, to which situation he had been appointed among the prisoners at Malacca, to suggest some improvements in the system adopted at the settlement, which had been in consequence introduced.24

Eight years later, however, his position appeared to have altered, resulting in a serious allegation against the superintendent at Melaka, Captain Man. Tikiri wrote: That on the 13th January last year, [1856] petitioner obtained permission from Capt Man to attend his auction sale at Pringet where your petitioner purchased a few things on commission but certain parties came and informed Capt Man that your petitioner was the cause of his losing some Rs 400 as the Chinese did not bid against your petitioner for which false and malicious accusation your petitioner was sent to his dwelling and without enquiry was severely beaten with a stick which broke his head when he fell senseless. Then he was kicked by Captain Man until he was dissuaded from further violence by his lady the effects of which is that his right arm is injured as to cause a numness [sic] and occasional pain till this day. And he was then confined all night and the next day he was tied up to the triangle and flogged twenty five lashes, a degradation to avoid which your petitioner did all that laid in his power, your petitioner at present continues to be employed in the 3rd class by an order said to be made before Captain Man left this [settlement].25

The issue at hand was evidently Tikiri’s desire for preferential treatment and Man’s refusal to give it to him, since “the prisoner was handed over on same terms as his fellows.”26 Tikiri was worked in irons due to Man’s belief that A superintendent has the least right to let the original station in life of anyone under his charge to influence in any respect his treatment. Families must learn that degradation is the crime and not the punishment. It is contrary to English ideas of justice to permit circumstances of birth, which have not deterred a man from sin to exempt him from its penalties. Found Tickory a man whose plausibility wanted confidence and unworthiness betrayed it.27

The details of the case warrant closer scrutiny. Initially, Man had recognized Tikiri’s station in life by giving him several appointments as overseer. The first of these, in March 1855, was to reorganize an unproductive brick field, which Tikiri

136

hidden hands and divided landscapes

had taken much credit for managing over several months. His total ignorance of the ordinary process of manufacture provided evidence to the contrary and soon precipitated his demotion. Additionally, the magistrates in Melaka town complained that Tikiri was interfering in litigious disputes, and Captain Man determined to send him away to the countryside. A summary of Tikiri’s appointments could be reviewed through his several evasions.28 His first country appointment, to supervise a lime quarry on an island in the harbor, was abandoned after a few months due to disease (probably malaria). On his second appointment, to Kepang, a station twenty miles interior from the town, he befriended a tin miner, Aboo, and resided with him, neglecting his penal duties. His absence was discovered by Captain Man, who visited the mines when disturbances there attracted police attention. Tikiri was speedily dispatched to Ayer Panas on a project directly under Man’s supervision. The project at Ayer Panas, which was the conversion of a hot spring into a bathhouse for invalids, involved considerable manual labor and a series of demeaning tasks such as carrying Captain Man’s basket of provisions, cleaning his horse, and emptying the hot spring of water. The objective undoubtedly was to humiliate Tikiri into compliance. His next appointment was in Gandung, superintending men felling timber, but here too he absconded to Constable Dannie’s plantation, where he lived as caretaker. When the timber failed to arrive and the work gang dispersed, Tikiri was brought back to town in disgrace, further demoted to third class, and placed under a peon. Man decided that he could not be trusted out of his sight, and personal surveillance was the solution. Following a short period of sickness and a more favorable performance, Tikiri, who appeared to have reformed, was reinstated as underforeman under Captain Man and put to work on church repairs.29 During a period of one year, Tikiri Banda had taken up and lost five appointments due to negligence and aversion to labor. Was it because labor was beneath his social station as Radhala or courtier caste of the Kandyan aristocracy? Or was he resisting British authority like most proud Kandyans? Like the Malays in the Straits, the indigenous population in Kandy had refused to work in British plantations, a form of resistance that was countered by employing indentured South Indian workers. Writing on prison discipline in Ceylon in 1849, A. G. Green observed, “A great obstacle to the profitable employment of prisoners consists of their unwillingness to work for a government, whom they consider as their enemy, in depriving them their liberty.”30 There appeared to be “a natural repugnance to toil inherent in the native of the tropics,” which was exacerbated under the conditions of imprisonment.31 Unlike in Singapore, various incentives had to be introduced to the Ceylonese prisoners, in the form of an allowance and in

the perils of association

137

offers to reduce their sentences, for attendance in classes on specific trades, and in divine service and school, respectively. Tikiri’s aversion to labor, however, could be attributed to a far more productive distraction. While being shuttled to and fro between several stations in Melaka on relatively uninteresting projects, he had started a school in the town in competition with an existing colonial establishment.32 Since prisoners were not allowed to conduct business, this entire establishment was kept secret, but it badly needed furniture for new premises. When Captain Man announced a sale of his furniture and personal effects at Pringet, in lieu of his departure from the settlement, Tikiri seized the opportunity and, arriving at the auction during Captain Man’s absence, bid and won $400 worth of furniture—on tic (credit). During the auction, in a conversation with a visiting officer, he described Captain Man’s replacement, a person of high official rank, as “a drunkard.”33 While Tikiri was thus engaged, Mr. Klauper, Tikiri’s competitor in the business of education, approached Captain Man at his office, declaring that Tikiri had enticed away his pupils.34 On being faced with these charges Tikiri denied them unconditionally and before God, enraging Captain Man, who struck him on his forehead with his walking stick. He further sentenced Tikiri to half a dozen lashes for libel against an officer.35 At this point in Tikiri’s history, we witness how a convict’s petition generated a profusion of paperwork. Petitions to the governor were rare due to the low levels of literacy among prisoners, but when they did occur they elicited detailed responses from all those involved. In defense of his own action, which he regretted, and as proof that he had not victimized Tikiri, Captain Man stated an earlier breach of discipline where he had withheld corporal punishment. Tikiri and two other convicts had previously committed highway robbery to settle a financial dispute with a certain individual. Although he lost his position as Duffadar as punishment for his crime, Tikiri was not flogged as the case warranted. Captain Man used this previous example of leniency to salvage his own reputation.36 While monetization prevailed and was acceptable within the prison system, challenges to British authority would not be tolerated. On his release from prison in 1864, Tikiri set up as a shopkeeper, writer, and amateur lawyer in Melaka. John Cameron notes that he loved to show his law library to visitors.37 He describes Tikiri as “a singular and remarkable man of this class,” a shopkeeper, scribe, who gives legal advice and is a useful source of comfort and information to strangers. Cameron gives an account of Tikiri’s ingenuity, dating from before his conviction, which had caused him to be respected by the king of Siam, the details of which McNair includes in his tenth chapter of stories about convicts.38 According to Lawrie’s Gazetteer, Tikiri Banda

138

hidden hands and divided landscapes

Dunuwille also known as Ramalaka Banda brought a Chinese family with him on his repatriation to Ceylon and employed them at his Unumbuwe coffee plantation.39 He married twice, first to the daughter of the Ekneligoda Maha Dissave and the second time to the daughter of Unambuwe Dissawe, both prominent families, and had four children: George; Charles, who married the daughter of Weragama Loku Banda; a daughter, Dunuwille Monaravila Keppetipola Kumarihamy; and a third son, Punchi Banda.40 Tikiri died in 1898. Whereas Tikiri’s acts of insubordination could be variously interpreted as class hubris, anticolonial patriotism, or sheer impudence, the punishment they invited appears nominally excessive. Evidently he manipulated a system geared for mindless obedience with great ingenuity. The “injurious” nature of corporal punishment was undoubtedly calculated by its humiliating impact on his social station. Consequently, his case does not expose the true violence of the colonial project evident in the treatment of political prisoners. However, it is apparent that intelligent natives challenged penal policy and its prerogatives and exploited its material economy, thus destabilizing the myths of reform, equity, and benevolent colonization. Political prisoners, in contrast, were held in isolation.

The Convict Martyr The most serious penal case to be assigned to the Singapore system was that of Nihal Singh, known as Bhagwan Singh or Bhai Maharaj Singh, the leader of an anticolonial rebellion in Sarkar Khalsaji, Lahore, Darbar. His transportation to Singapore was unusual, an isolated case, unconnected with the regular channels of penal displacements. In fact, Nihal Singh was removed from India largely to prevent his becoming a martyr to the anticolonial cause. Transportation to Singapore was intended to efface his memory and diminish its authority over Punjabi insurgents. In Punjab, protracted resistance had followed the defeat of the Lahore royal family in the Anglo-Sikh war of 1845–1846 and was organized first under the leadership of Maharani Jindan, the dowager queen of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, and later under Nihal Singh.41 The Lahore Darbar was the last of the independent principalities to fall to the British and its fall brought the entire country under colonial government. Its subordination raised a critical void in the region’s leadership, which was taken up by Nihal Singh, a disciple of the religious leader Bhai Bir Singh. The spiritual background and charismatic authority of Nihal Singh combined to attract a large following of anti-British chiefs and villagers, thus sustaining the struggle for independence even after the fall of Lahore.42 As described by Ahluwalia, his objectives were to free the captive prince Dhuleep

the perils of association

139

Singh, to neutralize the British policy of setting religious and communal groups against one another, and to disrupt the administration through subversive and surprise attacks on their treasuries and cantonments. Having survived several successful confrontations with the British, Nihal Singh had acquired a considerable reputation prior to his capture. A Muslim informer betrayed his position, and Nihal Singh was apprehended, along with twenty-one others, while presiding over a meeting near Adampur in December 1849. Mr. Vansittart, deputy commissioner of Jalandur, wrote, “The Guru is not an ordinary man. He is to the natives what Jesus Christ is to the most zealous of Christians. His miracles were seen by tens of thousands, and are more implicitly believed than those worked by the ancient prophets,”43 an observation which the board of administration found to be “very objectionable.”44 Nihal Singh was denied the opportunity to defend himself in a court of law. Following his capture, Nihal Singh, along with Khurruck Singh, who was formerly a colonel in the service of the Lahore Durbar, were incarcerated in Jalandhur jail.45 However, it was soon recommended that he be moved first to the cantonment and then to Allahabad, as his reputation in the locality might incite unrest or attempts to rescue him. The loyalty of the Sikh corps in the cantonment also seemed precarious.46 In January the Guru was escorted to Umballa, to Allahabad, and finally to Fort William in Calcutta, in readiness for his transportation to Singapore, where Col. Butterworth was directed to confine him “in one of the most excellent apartments of that most comfortable gaol.”47 The choice of transportation for political prisoners depended largely on their state of health, since death, followed by martyrdom, would feed further anticolonial rebellions. In the case of Nihal Singh it was observed that “[h]e is strong and would not be endangered by the voyage. . . . Nor is there a chance of him committing self-martyrdom.” He had abandoned an attempt to starve himself to death at Jalandhur after forty hours or so. Nihal Singh and his disciple Khurruck Singh were dispatched on the Mohammed Shaw, along with a guard of one sergeant, one corporal, and six privates for the sum of Rs. 2,000, and arrived in Singapore on 14 June 1850 to serve their sentences in one of the upper levels of the civil jail.48 The confinement of political prisoners in the civil jail necessitated continuous surveillance by a military guard, an expense the Singapore government was reluctant to bear, so at first an appeal was made to house the convicts at Fort Cornwallis.49 The Indian authorities were unrelenting, however, and the two prisoners remained in total confinement in the civil jail in Singapore. They were given a special diet including Bengal rice, flour, ghee, dhal, sugar, salt, coffee, curry stuffs, onions, chilies, vegetables, dried dates, and milk. They were given firewood and an unlimited supply of water, and a cook was hired at four dollars

140

hidden hands and divided landscapes

per mensem to prepare their meals, although a request for a small quantity of bhang (cannabis) to be supplied daily was denied. At first, the two prisoners occupied the whole right wing on the upper floor of the civil jail but were later, following modifications to it, confined to a single room, which as noted in a communication by Khurruck Singh to his friends was “15 wide and 20 long.”50 An exercise yard was reserved exclusively for them. Khurruck Singh was the younger and more recalcitrant of the two prisoners. In January 1851 he is said to have “given to his temper, by refusing his food, tearing the clothes off his own back, and throwing things at the head and the keeper of the jail.”51 In 1853 he made a request (which was denied) for the chaplain to visit him, expressing his desire to become a Christian. By perusing the Bible and mentioning the names of Moses and Jesus, he sought to convince the government of his reformed status.52 Later in 1854 Khurruck Singh wrote to the Sikh congregation in Aurangabad, making references to beatings. “They beat innocent what is to become of us guilty? They beat it every ghuree and chastise it every puhar. There is no rest (oh my heart) to the Ghuryal all night long.”53 Thereafter, all correspondence between political prisoners and their friends and relatives in India was intercepted and phrases such as “We will come within one year, send us your Slaokumnamah [sic]” (reply) and “there is news of these slaves being set free,” aroused the suspicions of the government.54 A drawing of a ship and an island, depicting Singapore, on the cover of a letter from the Guru to Jusunent Singh excited the prison authorities excessively, generating a surfeit of official correspondence. The letters from Nihal Singh to the Sadh Sungut (Sangat), the Sikh congregation in Aurangabad, were replete with religious sentiments and despairing commentaries on his condition. He wrote, We oh lord always forget thee but thou art beneficent and the forgiver of sins. Whoever goes to see thee is relieved of all worldly cares and troubles. Come to my aid oh lord now that I am on the eve of destruction. Oh true guide, the hope of the hopeless, I who am utterly hopeless adore you, I am the dust of your feet. Deprived of all favor placed in confinement, there is no remedy [ for me].55

By this time Nihal Singh was suffering considerably from cataract. A cancerous sore on the left side of his tongue had caused considerable blood loss, and the glands on the same side of the neck had become swollen and contusive.56 The smell of the sore was offensive and traveled throughout the confined space of the prison. Concerned for his patient’s health, Assistant Sergeant Cowper recommended on 1 July 1856 that “he be allowed to drive in a gharry a few miles in the country twice or three times a week” so he could “benefit from a change of air.” As is typical in the case of the colonial bureaucracy, the recommendation

the perils of association

141

had to be forwarded to India for approval, and before a response was received, Nihal Singh died in confinement on 5 July 1856.57 Following the death of Nihal Singh, the incarceration of Khurruck Singh became an issue, and in December of that same year he was released. He was allowed to “live at large under police surveillance,” with a small allowance of Rs. 60,58 but persisted in anticolonial activities by secretly contacting prisoners outside the lines and inciting them to rebellion.59 Since there were sixty or seventy Sikh convicts in Singapore out of a total body of two to three thousand prisoners, we may imagine that his influence was not substantial. However, the year was 1857, some months before the Indian mutiny, and Khurruck Singh’s loyalties had remained undivided. In fact, he was reconvicted due to the proBritish loyalties of the “prison gentry,” a Parsee prisoner and prisoner called Badoo, who made a deposition implicating him in a plot to attack the European population while they were in church.60 Although Governor Blundell attributed this incident to the drunken utterances of abuse typical of Kurruck and was disinclined to trust the convicts’ complaint any more than he trusted the loyalty of the Sikhs, he had Kurruck removed to Fort Cornwallis, Penang, in the interest of the residents.61 The segregation of the two Sikh prisoners, their isolation from their community, and the government’s refusal to allow them to go out in public seems to have been justified considering the behavior of Khurruck Singh following his release. The government’s fear of rising anticolonial sentiment was well-founded. Yet unlike Tikiri Banda, Nihal Singh and Khurruck Singh did not figure in the vast penal labor regime through which the rest of the penal population was being organized. Their status, location, and confinement paralleled that of the European prisoner. Anticolonial resistance produced a political subject that had to be contended with and confined, both physically and socially, so that further political intelligence would not be disseminated to the rest of the population. Bhai Maharaj Singh’s tomb was originally located in the Singapore general hospital grounds, adjacent to Pearl’s Hill, and was appropriated for prayers by Sikh devotees. It was moved to the Silat Road Gurudwar in 1965 due to the expansion of the hospital. At this time there was dispute as to the identity of the tomb, which was also attributed to Baba Karam Singh. The Sikh community canonized Nihal Singh and built a memorial shrine around his tomb in 1995, the only monument of its scale to a colonial prisoner in Singapore.62 The case of Nihal Singh is both touching and troubling, an example of a valuable life wasted away in a colonial prison, quite contrary to the productivity argued by penal reformers. His story is in every way an exception that proves the rule, an example of cellular incarceration and segregation without the reformative impulse. Underlying this exception, however, were the racist assumptions

142

hidden hands and divided landscapes

of relative intelligence and the lack of political consciousness that supported the longevity of the system of association.

The Problem of Association As observed by prison commissioner McNair, in Europe there was “a mind capable of some reflection, which if blunted by crime and vicious habits, may yet in the retirement of the cell be roused to a sense of right and wrong.”63 Whereas in Asia there was “in many instances a predominance of the animal nature, an absence of moral perception, almost an absence of the power of thought.” The incarceration of a prisoner in a separate cell would not lead to solitary reflection. It was far more likely that he would, “on the expiration of his daily task, either brood over his former instance of crime, or fall into that torpid sleep, which results from a natural dullness, and which the climate helps to encourage.” In McNair’s opinion, confinement had little impact on “the soul” of the Asian prisoner.64 In fact, religious and cultural differences suggested the absence of a soul that could be converted through reflection and remorse. In the colonies, confinement was not based on an ideological desire for moral correction. It was believed that “[t]he convicts in Indian jails may indeed be said to be comparatively little removed from the moral status of the rest of the population.”65 For this reason and because of the anxiety caused by the Indian mutiny in 1857 (see chapter 6), any form of religious education in the prison was also forbidden. In 1859 missionaries were prohibited from entering the jail, except by special request of a prisoner, “[b]ecause they are not free men and cannot escape his preaching if they need to” and because a missionary could not be trusted “to measure his action.”66 The government’s skepticism toward religion is clearly evident in the case of Victoria Adelaide Hassey, daughter of American and Eurasian parents.67 Accused of being an accomplice to murder and selling the property of the murdered man, she was transported from Agra on the ship Sooblow Salam in 1855, in the company of thirty-four other females aged between sixteen to sixty years of age (see Appendix L).68 While unconcerned that Hassey was “young, educated and a Christian,” an observation that “excited the sympathy of ladies in the community,” the government expressed anxiety over her companions, three of whom, Suddan, Durboh, and Musst Sooija (sic), were completely blind and a few others partially so. The governor’s main concern was the need to provide them with separate accommodations and the expense of maintaining and attending to those unfit for work. The labor, morality, or reform of women barely enters the colonial record, even following the creation of separate facilities as late as 1860. Despite the

the perils of association

143

transportees on the Sooblow Salam, transportation of women ceased in 1850.69 During the first few decades of transportation, the government disposed of female prisoners by encouraging them to get married, and they were in fact highly sought after by the predominantly male population of convicts and immigrants. For example, Allegasetty Reddy Swamy, who had been convicted of robbery and transported to Singapore in 1840, had been married twice by 1858, when she was found murdered.70 Her first husband was Moochoopillay Vencatadry (Muthupillai Venkat Reddy), a life-sentence prisoner, and her second husband was Ram Sing, a tindal in the convict department. She had two children by her first marriage, an additional expense in the minds of the authorities, who remained in the female ward for a further year (following her death) until their grandmother from Visakhapatnam came forward to take care of them. In short, where females were concerned, the government did not consider a criminal reputation a hindrance and sought to get rid of them as expediently as possible. The authorities sanctioned the marriage of unmarried female convicts, rapidly advancing them to first class upon three years of good behavior, and encouraged partnerships from outside the prison so as not to produce a convict caste.71 The racist belief that the Asian prisoner was beyond morality and the reluctance to interfere in religious matters reinforced the colonial penal environment’s orientation toward labor. In fact, labor ideology and its associated practices were not confined to transportees; the belief was commonly held with regard to all non-European prisoners in the system. Such distinctions were also evident in the persistence of corporal punishment and substandard penal environments in the colonies—in 1875 there were 13,301 cases of corporal punishment in Indian jails, and between 1843 and 1867, 40,550 prisoners died in the jails of Bengal, largely due to overcrowding and poor hygiene.72 In Singapore, as late as 1868, Governor Ord refused to withdraw the public spectacle of capital punishment to behind the walls of the prison.73 The continued resilience of such premodern practices, supported by fragile arguments, was symptomatic of the colonial prison’s focus on the prisoner’s body; in fact, as argued by David Arnold, the colonial penal system in India was one of the primary sites for colonizing the body.74 The construction of the colonial prisoner as a corporeal object through his or her laboring body, and the conviction that this body had no mind attached to it, were mandated by the system of association. However, the history of the system of penal association in India was fraught with difficulties from its very inception. The differences between the system in India and the one in the Straits are noteworthy because deficiencies in the former gave rise to the latter. As argued by Arnold, the Indian penal system was a highly contested site of oppression and resistance between Indian subjects and British rulers, convicts and warders, high and low caste, elite/educated and ordinary criminals.75 Its internal divisions

144

hidden hands and divided landscapes

were intense and dialectical, due to contestation between long-established caste groups and marginalized rural populations.76 Indian prisoners were identified as collectives, an attribute of the orientalist view of Indian society, and were collectively damned as criminal tribes whereas, conversely, caste identities were raised as a major obstacle to uniform systems of governance.77 In short, even prior to their transportation, the differentiated bodies of Indian convicts were the focus of attention. However, while the denial of caste-based practices could be used as a means to humiliate and discipline prisoners in India, it was also the means of their resistance to colonial penal practice. Caste relations provided a basis for negotiating cultural space and challenging European authority and even an opportunity for using colonial categories to their advantage. Rebellions related to the removal of caste-based practices or the perceived imposition of European cultural or religious norms abound in histories of the prison in India, as do examples of sympathy and cooperation elicited from villagers and caste leaders on the basis of perceived threats to the caste order. In short, Indian prisoners both occupied and produced a socially divided environment wherein association with family members, townspeople, caste groups, and fellow prisoners was possible and was potentially disruptive. Arnold describes how issues of climate, of fewer habitual offenders, and the gregarious nature of Indians were typically raised in arguments against introducing separation in India.78 However, the practice of association, which was essential for the management and extraction of labor from prisoners, was fundamentally flawed. Social divisions by caste, religion, and race always superseded structural ones, and the resultant solidarities also undermined the abstraction of labor, making it difficult to discipline the Indian prisoners into a new labor force. The same was true for Ceylon, according to Governor Green, where the reluctance to allow contact between hired labor and prisoners during the construction of the Welikada Jail first initiated the system of jail industries in 1841.79 Green additionally noted few tradesmen among the penal population in Ceylon, maybe one in every hundred, and argued that training in industry gave prisoners a sense of economic value and responsibility that prevented recidivism. In comparison, transportation to the Straits replaced severed filial relations with new associations shaped by collective labor that were comparably politically void. In short, transportation, by physically removing prisoners from the protective ambit of their kindred, initially achieved the kind of bodily individuation and separation that the colonial prison in India intended but could not accomplish. While a small number of caste Indians strove to maintain their cultural boundaries, the majority of convicts, including Muslims, Adivasis, peasants, and Dalits (untouchables), did not reproduce the caste divisions found in

the perils of association

145

the Indian prison.80 Separation, which was initially identified through religion rather than race in the colonial record, was short-lived. Social solidarities based on new affiliations were shaped and facilitated by the penal labor regime and soon emerged to undermine it. Due to the openness of the penal environment and the mobility of transportees, coupled with their “gregarious” temperaments, convicts soon overcame the traumas of social displacement. In fact, Penang was one of the more desirable destinations in the convict geography, as is evident in the numbers of petitioners asking to be transported there.81 Convicts gradually learned to seize opportunities created daily within the penal routine and use them to counter colonial repression. The system of association was adopted by the colonial government at its own peril.

Hanky Panky in the Prison Department Anthony Gorman writes that prison regimes in the Middle East under both British and French colonial governments “were riddled with systemic flaws, such as chronically corrupt and unqualified staff, limited resources and residual archaic practices.”82 The daily prison routine, described as the customary order, was moderated through complex and intimate relationships between inmates where contraband, gambling, and various forms of entertainment had their place.83 Collusion between the guarded and the guards led to predictable forms of corruption or invited particular hostilities around religious and ethnic divisions. The system of association produced a corresponding spatial environment ideal for the growth of penal social networks. Monetization, contractual relationships, and property ownership strengthened these bonds into a vibrant social economy with its own internal system of opportunities and entitlements. The social changes wrought on traditional communities by colonial economic policies in the settlement outside were replicated in microcosm within the prison walls. In 1870 a convict, Toolseran (Tulsie Ram), brought a case against overseer Pengully (Pengelley) in Penang, accusing the overseer of swindling him in various business transactions.84 Tulsie Ram’s designation within the penal establishment was of attendant at the Butterworth Hospital. He had paid special attention to Pengelley’s family when they were hospitalized, thus securing a long-term obligation. Convict orderlies, cooks, and attendants ran the hospitals and asylums in all three settlements and took advantage of the scarcity of medical staff to engage in other private activities. Tulsie Ram privately hired boats for transporting building materials to public work sites at Butterworth. It was he who had supplied the timber for the Juroo and Pry bridges with the full knowledge of the assistant engineer.85 Tulsie Ram was removed to Singapore in August 1868 to “bring him under control,” during which time Pengelley became his business agent.

146

hidden hands and divided landscapes

When Pengelley took charge of Tulsie Ram’s property during his absence, he continued to hire two boats to Mootoo Adrar (Muttu Adar), the contractor, depositing the income from this business into Tulsie Ram’s account for the maintenance of his family.86 Pengelley saw nothing wrong in this practice since Tulsie Ram had a flourishing business even before he reached TOL status.87 Two letters dated 8 January 1869 and 8 March 1869, responding to memorandums from Mr. Magalhains (Magallanes), the assistant engineer and superintendent of convicts in Penang, even sanctioned Tulsie Ram’s business practices. In fact, once Pengelley gave up boat hire on the instructions of Mr. Magallanes, the assistant engineer continued to hire the boats to Muttu Adar for the same work. Peter Zinoman, writing on the prison subcultures in Indochina, observes that there were two parallel social hierarchies, the first imposed formally by the prison regime and the second created by the inmates themselves.88 The prisoner elite, backed by the institution, wielded considerable authority over the lower grades of inmates by establishing a “formal pecking order of prisoners.”89 They helped run the institution, playing important roles in “bookkeeping, surveillance, provisioning, healthcare, building maintenance, and the enforcement of labor discipline.”90 In short, they were the armature of the self-governing prison. In the case of Tulsie Ram, who was relatively low in this hierarchy, we find that two overseers and a superintendent exercised their authority in order to abuse his property for their own gain. Contrary to expectations, upon his return to Penang Tulsie Ram petitioned the government with several charges against Pengelley. The first charge was for swindling him over the hire of boats. The second charge was for pilfering from Tulsie Ram’s boxes, which had been handed over to the penal department.91 Pengelley was found to be in possession of several articles supposedly belonging to Tulsie Ram. They included, 2 guns in cases, 1 telescope, 3 powder flasks, 3 shot pouches, 3 pairs children’s shoes, sent by Tulsie Ram from Singapore for his own children, 3 bags leaden balls, 2 argand lamps, 2 wall shades or candle sticks, 4 shades for do, 1 dark lanthorn [lantern], 1 bundle of 9 malacca canes, sent by Tulsie Ram to a friend, 1 trench moderator lamp, a round table, 2 american chairs, 2 common globe lamps, 1 Oge table, 1 pony, 2 buggies.92

Paint and paint oil, letter books and indent books, and a dozen gimlets found in his possession, however, were believed to be the property of the government. One of the buggies, identified by the European head overseer, had been constructed in the prison.

the perils of association

147

The head overseer, William Stuart, who was called upon to investigate the property, implicated overseer Deen (Dean), who possessed the keys to Tulsie Ram’s boxes and had admitted to removing certain articles. According to Stuart, “[t]here seems to have been a regular system of wholesale robbery in all shapes and forms carried on here.”93 The third accusation against Pengelley, whereby misconduct by contractors, convicts, and convict officers in secretly negotiating contracts for the Public Works Department (PWD) was exposed,94 compounded this observation. The convicts were claiming privileged appointments in collusion with certain prison officers. Pengelley was accused of not reporting these events to his superior, and the resultant court inquiry exposed a complex chain of corruption that caused the resignation and transfer of several PWD officials.

The Prison Subculture Among the individuals involved in surreptitiously fixing work contracts was a Ceylonese convict, Thomas Keyt, who seemed at that time to have been unwittingly drawn into the penal subculture. In fact, a petition written by him on 6 September 1867 to Her Majesty Queen Victoria begging for his release stated, The petitioner feels that his separation from his country; his home and those dear to him; the prospects which were once held out to him and which have been blasted forever in his own country, and the various other losses his name and character have sustained, are of themselves a very severe punishment to him. The petitioner sincerely desires to show himself to the world a reformed and better man; to be of comfort and consolation to his aged and bereaved parents, who share in his miseries, and in furtherance of this end he implores at your most Gracious Majesty’s hands one chance that may conduce to a realization of his ardent wishes.95

At the time of this petition John Thomas Keyt, the son of Mr. H. Keyt, the former third assistant to the colonial secretary of Ceylon, had served two years and some months in the Penang jail.96 Mr. H. Keyt was a man of considerable standing, a justice of the peace and pensioner upon the civil service list of the colony. His son, unlike the majority of Ceylonese convicts transported to the Straits Settlements from 1846 to 1867, was a rarity: a white-collar criminal. Many of his compatriots were accused of far more serious crimes such as anticolonial rebellion, murder, or manslaughter. Numerous Appuhamys, Punchi Ralles, and Bandas augmented a steady supply of convicts from Bengal, Madras, and Bombay presidencies, providing an endless stream of manual laborers for the Straits Public Works Department.

148

hidden hands and divided landscapes

Testimonials from Ceylonese officials supporting Keyt’s petition were highly complimentary. Governor A. G. Green of Welikada Gaol, where Keyt was held prior to transportation, observed, I am happy to be able to say that during that time (9 months) his behaviour has been all I could wish the high talent which he undoubtedly possesses has at all times been freely and willingly placed at the service of Government, and I sincerely hope that his quickness, intelligence and aptness at resources coupled with continuous good conduct may ensure that amelioration (alleviation) of his punishment to which he anxiously looks forward. He leaves a highly respected family in sad trouble.97

Thomas Keyt had obtained a “tolerant education” in Queens College, Colombo, and had apprenticed himself as a student at law. A few months prior to completing the term of his articles, however, he had “fallen a victim” to the crime of forgery. He was duly tried, and upon his guilty plea was sentenced by the supreme court of Ceylon in 1865 to transportation for a period of seven years. A penitent Keyt declared, at an ill moment, in the company of bad associates, the evils arising from which his youthful indiscretion could not then perceive (for he was only twenty years of age) he thoughtlessly committed the crime for which he has already had much to suffer and still suffers to a miserable extent; also that the amount was inconsiderable and lasted only for a moments pleasure.98

The first two years of his punishment were undoubtedly taxing for a young man of a well-to-do family. Indeed, the punishment appears severe, considering the nature of the crime. However, due to his legal education, Keyt found his services in high demand in the underfunded and shorthanded establishment at the Penang jail. Keyt’s evidence of the secret meeting among the overseers (attended by Pengelley) was key to unraveling corruption in the prison system. He stated, The door was guarded to prevent interruption. Mr. Mcguire explained the object of the meeting. An old Brahmin was called to administer an oath to the hindoos present, binding them to secrecy. Others excepting Mr Pengelley swore on a Bible. They swore to indemnity and support each other. . . . Gopaul [a convict] sided with Mootoo Lodean having organized to take part in the contract should it revert to Mootoo. He spoke for settling the affair. He said he had been long enough in the PWD and knew much of their doings in it. He could

the perils of association

149

if he wished get them all dismissed from their offices but he would be sorry to see them and their children thrown upon the straits.99

Keyt was accused of signing a promissory note regarding the award of government tenders. At the point in the meeting when the convict Gopaul (Gopal) threatens the overseers, we see the prison subculture at work. The hierarchy of authority was inverted by ordinary convicts who used evidence of former instances of corruption to blackmail prison officers. The social solidarities forged in the prison through the system of association undoubtedly generated opportunities and advantages for particular groups of convicts, even turning them against the authorities. As observed by Arnold, “[t]he prison created an institutional and social space that was colonized by other unofficial networks of power and knowledge.”100 Although, unlike India, “acts of collective resistance were still exceptional” in Southeast Asia, there appeared to be other ways and means to undermine the colonial penal system.101 A letter sent by Keyt to friends in Ceylon in 1870, five years into his sentence, suggests a change of heart and status. He was allowed to have money and tobacco, to correspond with his friends, and “in fact to do just as he pleased,” wrote Keyt.102 His letter, intercepted by the Ceylon government, was produced as evidence “that transportation from Ceylon to the Straits was not a serious punishment and was not regarded as such by the convicts themselves.”103 The irate Singapore authorities declared in response that Keyt was an exception to the rule, “a young colored man of good education and respectable parentage,” who was employed as a clerk in the prison office and was “most improperly” permitted “various indulgences altogether prohibited by the regulations.”104 Following this embarrassing exchange, Thomas Keyt was speedily dispatched to Singapore to be disciplined among other recalcitrant prisoners. He arrived at a time when the new Government House, a complex neo-Palladian structure, was absorbing the energies of transportees. In fact, the penal subculture appeared to be thriving on the excesses of this project, as is evident in a court case for which Keyt reappears as witness.105 Iron mongery, such as keys, locks, bolts, and hinges, were understandably the only building materials that were imported into the prison, and when the hinges for the Government House doors went missing, the prisoners were implicated. They in turn accused a European convict, William Stuart, a carpenter and bricklayer who acted as their overseer. The convicts declared that Stuart had placed the hinges in his box of tools, which he took with him on furlough to Europe. The various opportunities for corruption within the prison system are traceable in the passage of the Government House stores through the penal economy.

150

hidden hands and divided landscapes

They were (a) brought over by overseer Richards of the PWD, (b) checked by convict Blazé, (c) a list was prepared by convict Wendt, (d) handed to Keyt, (e) cross-checked by Pengelley, and (f) by PWD apprentice Neubrenner one month later. Missing along with the hinges was Stuart’s toolbox. The identities of Keyt’s fellow witnesses in the case that followed suggest the formation of social solidarities within the prison subculture. A Ceylonese convict, Blazé, transported along with his brother for embezzlement and theft and employed as an interpreter in the prison, appears to have been the chief conspirator. Blazé had been described as one of the biggest scoundrels in the island of Ceylon, “who kept a diary of his rogueries duly posted.”106 He had previously scattered notices of a conspiracy to set the prison ablaze and was punished in the refractory ward and placed in irons. Blazé was responsible for checking the stores after overseer Richards. His convict accomplices included Chimpan, a peon, and Seytoo Hamy, a carpenter, also from Ceylon. Yet another Ceylonese, George Wendt, a first-class convict also convicted of forgery, was responsible for preparing the incomplete list and handing it to Keyt.107 Keyt, Wendt, and Blazé, who were educated convicts in the first class and of Eurasian or Burgher extraction, undoubtedly found they were on common ground based on race/nationality and class. Keyt was described by Stuart as being “very troublesome, often punished, and would have been much oftener so, but for his cunning and lawyers quibbles.”108 In fact, Keyt’s statement appeared to be well-rehearsed and based on the account of the previous witness, a strategy that boded ill for the defense of William Stuart. He had addressed several of Stuart’s boxes, excepting the one in question; he had completed the list of goods, heard Stuart express a desire to take the box with him to London, and watched him take the keys to the store, asking that they be “left about.”109 The transformation of Thomas Keyt from a penitent young man to a wily conspirator is a strong indictment of the penal system’s capacity for reform. Such influences were typical of the colonial prison; in fact Gorman observes that the level of self-organization in the prison, not only into hierarchies of class but through political affiliations or customary practices, was an essential part of the prison subculture and a form of resistance to authority.110 The prison was constantly penetrated by outside forces, and communal accommodation created opportunities for plotting collective acts of subversion. More importantly, Keyt’s case reveals that the work yards were run on a monetary system, which the convicts used to their advantage, with the government intervening only when civil laws were broken. Although cases of theft, libel, negligence, and misappropriation were called up before the magistrate, the activities that gave rise to them would often persist unchecked. The inventorization of stores was left to

the perils of association

151

forgers and embezzlers (rather than guards), not because they were trustworthy but because they were literate.

The Case of the Missing Hinges A watercolor rendering of the hinges from Government House, exquisitely depicted on cloth, is available among the colonial records of the period. They are drawn to their actual scale to ensure the greater accuracy of the order. Purchased in June 1868 by the colonial engineer, they are in many ways a metaphor for the continuing, albeit remote, authority of the metropole over its colonies in the Straits Settlements. It is curious therefore that this piece of history records those very hinges that were removed by a group of prisoners from the government stores. Why did the loss of a box of iron mongery raise so much anxiety in the prison establishment? The list of deficiencies suggested that the expense incurred by the loss was in fact considerable. The articles on the list included eleven longtailed brass hinges, thirteen iron tower bolts, seventy-seven six-inch brass built hinges, and eighty-five four-inch brass built hinges, with a value of $197.10.111 Stuart reacted badly to the accusation of misappropriation and made personal attacks on the convict witnesses ranged against him.112 Accordingly, Andris Apoo (Andris Appu), convict coolie and blacksmith, was a murderer and “most notorious liar”; William de Rose (crime: manslaughter), who was employed on the wharfs, had incurred debts at various taverns; Adams was “one of the Queen’s bad bargains” and was constantly being placed in solitary confinement; Abdul Rahman was one of the notorious Penang rioters. A former sailor who had been convicted for a breach of duty, Stuart had first been employed in the prison as a carpenter. He was appointed overseer and then head overseer once his sentence expired. Although eligible for the position of assistant engineer, he was too “ill-educated” to qualify for the post; in fact he was illiterate.113 Stuart’s case was not supported by any of the convict peons or orderlies, which suggests the influence of the convicts over their peers. Veeran, Stuart’s own orderly, and the two tindals at the gate, Moideen (Mohideen) and Saat Cowdy Mallah, seemed oblivious to the whole incident, while Tarachand Takoor (Thakur), the petty officer at the jail work yard gate, could only give his word as to the movement of the boxes. However, Stuart heaped praise upon Appo Naide (Appu Naide), who was the best blacksmith in the shop, faithful and honest, undoubtedly one of the system’s successes.114 Stuart’s tool box was central to a debate regarding the license afforded to prisoners during the closing years of transportation. Did the convicts have a right to acquire property and could they do so while being maintained by the

152

hidden hands and divided landscapes

Figure 20. Hinges ordered for Government House, Singapore (PRO MPG1/832, UK: National Archives, Kew).

colonial government? Instructions to henceforth search the prisoners’ possessions on a daily basis suggested that this practice had long been abandoned. Not only were materials being transported in and out without record, but they could easily be removed in refuse carts that left the prison unchecked. The deputy colonial engineer, Mr. Shepherd, operated under the dictum that “too much strictness does little good and gives much trouble,” observed Stuart.115 While the case against Stuart brings the convicts and their subculture within our purview, his frustration with the various witnesses should be understood as a reaction to the social pressures of the European class system. The literacy that elevated Keyt, Blazé, and Wendt above their peers and gave them access to administrative processes placed them in opposition to working-class Europeans like Stuart. The European officers, Shepherd and Neubronner, did not like Stuart, whom they considered beneath their social class, while he himself always reserved his praise for skilled laborers. Lord Kimberly, on receiving Stuart in London, described him as “an imperfectly educated man of the artisan class” against whom a conspiracy seemed to have been developed.116 The victimization of Stuart exposes the social meanings attached to penal labor and the operation of the penal hierarchy. Labor was prescribed as reforma-

the perils of association

153

tive in the case of natives because of its limited mobility, which would demote the wealthy, humiliate the rebellious, and contain the ambitions of the criminal classes. Its antithesis was the leisurely life of the colonial landed gentry in their country houses. Labor was in fact the critical ingredient for organizing class in colonial society, a system that ultimately divided European from native. The hinges to Government House were never discovered and so the PWD, at great cost, had them shipped out from London once again. Stuart was exonerated due to lack of evidence, but he grew depressed and took to drinking. He was charged in 1868 with asking Wong Ah Seah, the government contractor, to build a small house for him at half price in exchange for a government tender (on the sea wall at Rocher). He was accused of accepting gifts of money, rice, tea, plantains, oranges, a case of wine, and a small dog as bribes on various occasions.117 The conclusion of his superiors on his case was that as an “ill-educated man,” unable to write, draw, or make correct estimates, he was “totally unfit for the position he now holds in the department.”118

Civil Rights of Convicts Our discussion of “convict histories” in the Straits says little about the significance of caste, race, or religion. Instead, it raises questions about property ownership, monetization, and material culture, key ingredients for processes of class formation and incorporation into an urban society. As argued by Green in Ceylon, the “advances in civilization” introduced by the British and the attributes and “usages” of their growing affluence produced a concomitant increase in crimes against property.119 These changes are evident in the tables of crimes in Colombo, the capital, versus Ceylon’s outer districts, Jaffna and Chilaw, where crimes against property are contrasted with quarrels, assaults, and murders. They are also evident much later in 1925 in the large numbers, twenty thousand per year, incarcerated in Burmese jails, noted by Brown.120 We might argue that the economic disparities of colonial society, defined by various ordinances, governed by revenue systems, and reorganized through laissezfaire trade, ultimately surfaced in the prisons. Race and class barriers that obstructed social mobility generated new recruits for the penal system. However, once within the system, convicts, upon reaching the first class, became peons and orderlies or obtained tickets of leave and entered the colonial economy. As argued by Clare Anderson, they were governed by the same laws as non-penal subjects and had recourse to the legal system, to barristers, whom they often used to their advantage.121 The role played by Tikiri Banda in legal disputes is an illustration of this point. The only difference was that convicts were ultimately disciplined within the penal system by their own officers. Although there is no

154

hidden hands and divided landscapes

evidence of convicts being naturalized, their civic entitlements were subject to discussion and debate. The education into civility of immigrant populations that was constructed against internment was intended to manage economic participation. If the government pretended ignorance of the covert penal economy and convicts were supposedly excluded from such processes, they could not be held accountable for them. However, there were some instances when colonial authorities were forced to acknowledge and arbitrate the economic life of prisoners. In 1869, as the transfer of the colony to the crown was being negotiated, it was noted that from among the 597 TOL convicts (468 male and 129 female) in the convict jail many had married and acquired property.122 A Bengali convict who died in 1865 left $50,000 of savings to be divided between his sons.123 These were the most common cases regarding property encountered by the colonial government, and a system had to be devised for dealing with them. An officer was appointed to hold such property in trust, subject to restrictions and possible forfeiture in the event of misbehavior, and to deal with all suits in the event of the prisoner’s death. A jail fund, created from the estates of deceased convicts for which credible claimants had failed to appear, was used to buy tools for work in June 1858.124 Turnbull even describes how a former convict who had been transported from India for coining counterfeit currency operated the same business in Penang, with a gang of helpers, for two years before transferring and expanding his trade in Malay territory.125 The entitlements of convicts, land ownership, and their material possessions were central to a discussion of their civil rights from 1855 to 1857.126 Since TOL convicts were indistinguishable from free men, they could buy and sell on the property market and, equally, could indulge in fraudulent transactions. Since neither Her Majesty’s courts of judicature nor the court of requests would permit a convict under sentence to sue or be sued for a civil right, this loophole in the law could be exploited by either party in a transaction involving a convict. Moreover, those on life sentence, being “civilly dead,” escaped justice on matters such as property taxes, payment of debts, the restoration of deposits, and the observance of contracts, which held the colonial material economy together. The Straits government pleaded with India to recognize the civil rights of convicts in the local magistrates’ courts, because “frauds not cognizable by the criminal law are being constantly perpetrated with impunity.” Whereas the penal department could punish fraud perpetrated by a convict by revoking “his” ticket of leave or demoting “him” to a lesser class, “he” was liable to be defrauded by others who exploited “his” predicament (the government argued). India’s reply, predictably, was that TOL convicts were freed from restraint not to accumulate property but to provision their subsistence.127 Local prisoners were dealt with in quite a different manner from transportees. Excepting the case of a felony in

the perils of association

155

Her Majesty’s courts, those under sentence in the ordinary tribunals could claim their civil status for legal purposes. However, since the indigenous legal systems had no laws for the confiscation or seizure of property and since pardon was always possible, a life convict could not be declared civilly dead and therefore retained his or her civil status and property.”128

Conclusion Convict liberties and their relationship to property is often discussed in comparison with slavery. Anderson notes that whereas slaves in Mauritius were governed by similar forms of authority, unlike convicts they had no recourse to the legal system.129 Outside the penal system, punishment was procedural and systems of inclusion and exclusion were measurable by the degree of legal access offered to convicts. Undoubtedly, the case of Australia far outdoes the Straits in this regard. As observed by John Braithwaite, Australian convicts had a right to hold property and sue to protect it, to sell part of their labour, to appear as witnesses in court cases, and to write petitions to a Governor who mostly treated them seriously. English prisoners did not enjoy these rights.130

The convict cases discussed in this chapter, while revealing the weaknesses of the system of association, do suggest that the rights of convicts were subject to scrutiny. Unlike slaves in Mauritius or indentured Indian laborers in plantations throughout Malaya, convicts could petition the governor or even the queen against ill treatment. Their rights were protected by the very laws that had damned them. The most significant reason for the license offered to convicts was the colony’s dependence on the penal labor system. Rather than the body and soul, labor and property characterized the dialectic of reform within the Straits prison system. Not only the government but private individuals were eager to maintain a source of cheap labor, criminal or otherwise. Monetization or the promise of entry into the economy and the feigned ignorance of routes that were being steadily carved toward it were incentives that ensured the productivity of prisoners. The imperatives of property, rather than reform, thus governed the pathways to citizenship in the Straits, a move that blatantly opposed European penal ideology. Multiple dialogic channels were generated by convicts for entering the settlements’ social structure, not only through the disciplinary regime but outside it and often in spite of it, due to their ingenuity and expanding social network. In fact, a very different concept of “industry” bridged convict labor and colonial citizenship, creating opportunities for novel forms of entitlement.

CHAPTE R 6

The Battle for the City

In the Indian penal system, religious and cultural arenas that were protected by law invariably became critical sites of social unrest. In short, as outlined in the previous chapter, spontaneous and unpredictable manifestations of cultural stereotypes with the propensity to transform into organized forms of resistance emerged as the greatest threat to colonial administrations. In the Straits prison system, however, cultural solidarities emphasized but did not supersede class divisions. Meanwhile in the settlement, as argued by Mak Lau Fong, Carl Trocki, and many others, native—mainly immigrant Chinese— resistance took the form of competition over colonial economic interests.1 In fact, the plural cultural categories imposed by the colonial economy appear not to have shaped political opposition or interethnic conflict comparable to the caste rivalries in India. They did not pit race against race, except in the colonial record. Admittedly, race or ethnicity has multiple interpretations. It can be interpreted according to objective criteria such as physical characteristics, ancestry, religion, language, nationality, color, physiognomy, or it can be interpreted according to subjective criteria such as the sense of belonging by which communities claim group identities.2 Mixed racial ancestry and overlapping racial and cultural identities complicate these interpretations further. However, the expression of difference as an attribute of identity is fundamental to the practice of culture. Under colonial rule, spatial and legal covenants, racial stereotypes, and political hierarchies constrained robust expressions of difference and reproduced them as manageable categories. “Natives,” moreover, were limited to licensed or liminal forms of cultural expression in arenas outside political interest, such as religion or caste, and the colonial government was compelled not to interfere in these areas by the queen’s proclamation of 1858.3 How then was culture produced, negotiated, and expressed in the Straits Settlements and how was it inscribed in urban space? Questions of culture 156

the battle for the city

157

and its operation in plural colonial environments reintroduce the overdetermined categories of public and private inherent in colonial urbanism and broaden our focus to include temporal appropriations of the colonial public sphere. Resistance, this chapter argues, took a different form in the Straits due to the dialogic interactions and contestations of immigrant communities. The operation of power across and within the immigrant body was often more significant than the colonial dialectic, although undoubtedly shaped by its demands. Claims made on colonial urban space, whether permanent or temporal, resulted from complex social and cultural negotiations that took these several pressures into account. They originated at the margins of both space and government. As argued by Stallybras and White, the marginalization of temporal public spaces, such as the fair, marketplace, and carnival, marks the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere.4 We find that on the one hand the bourgeoisie identified degeneracy, dirt, and disease, ideas associated with the “carnivalesque,” as activities external to themselves, but on the other hand they incorporated some of these same associations into their own imaginary and used them to represent their relative social advantage. In short, discourses on the “carnivalesque” reproduced a degenerate space and its corollary, an equivalent rationalized space in the new bourgeois public sphere.5 The nineteenth-century bourgeois values that were carried from Europe to its colonies applied these distinctions to racially different subjects, who were ostensibly placed outside the European project of modernity, albeit incorporated into it in numerous ways. The term “carnivalesque,” when applied to European history, describes temporal spaces, where ordinary citizens flout authority through informal and communal activity. In M. M. Bakhtin’s interpretation, the carnival was a “chronotope,” a temporal event that materialized time in space.6 It was a performance by subaltern social groups whose laughter and parody were directed against the political and social hierarchy. Whereas military parades in the colonies would declaim colonial authority to the colonized, in the space of the festival (the equivalent of the European carnival) there was no division between participants and spectators, and the political ambiguity of the festival was its strength. Unlike riots, disturbances, and violent political conflicts that were suppressed through an equivalent violence, cultural demonstrations had the power to undermine colonial authority through specific forms of subversion. We may argue that they occupied a politically sensitive zone between religion and secular government on which colonial policy was ambivalent. The study of the festival thus leads to an important critique of the political duality of the colonial context. In colonial period histories, the fear of the carnivalesque and its image of urban poverty was featured in constructions of the apparent danger and

158

hidden hands and divided landscapes

violence of everyday life. As discusssed in chapter 2, accounts of nineteenthcentury Singapore and Malaya by European travelers reinforced such anxieties by resorting to specific orientalist tropes, framed within a prejudiced worldview. This chapter is an effort to capture the performative and subaltern understanding of the city as native settlers may have experienced it. It argues that the knowledge of the city gained by prisoners through public works paved the way for particular acts of defiance against authority. If the operation of colonial power was covert and asserted its will through the urban landscape, then it was this very landscape that prisoners and natives contested. Native settlers imagined the three settlements of Melaka, Penang, and Singapore differently from the colonists, and as they struggled to assert their territorial rights they fell back on this imagination. This chapter looks specifically at Muharram, the Muslim-Indian festival appropriated by both convicts and immigrant settlers that became their common meeting point. It was inaccessible to Europeans and took on an identity of its own in the Straits Settlements, based on associations with place. In Straits cities, the Muharram festival, which periodically turned into riots, included Indian, Chinese, and Malay participants. More importantly, it was combined with the Boria, a form of Muslim-Indian folk drama, which was used to construct both cultural and territorial identities, often quite violently. In fact, far from being a utopian site of an alternative morality, the festival was the site of intense competition between migrant groups, who marginalized the Straits government through their activities. Due to the diversity of migrant identities in the Straits, the festival was transindividual and transoceanic and sometimes acted as a parody of colonial culture.7 The motive behind the Muharram festival was to disrupt colonial urban space, one of the few arenas available for common cultural negotiations, and to challenge its spatial determinants. In fact, quite often it was the threat of licensing or attempts to control or prohibit access to public space that provoked the transmutation of festivals into protracted and recurrent urban riots. It is significant that unlike caste-based rioting, prison breaks, and violent attacks on warders, Muharram processions or riots were not directly confrontational. They were in fact critical public arenas for various forms of “power play” between emergent secret societies. Shaped by the plural environment in distinct ways, native belligerence increasingly challenged its boundaries, and battles for Straits cities evolved as “contestations of space,” rather than authority.8 They reinscribed the colonial city periodically with an alternative plural imagination.

the battle for the city

159

The Native Imagination How was the plural geography imagined by immigrant communities? Some clues can be gleaned from the multiplicity of street names associated with specific parts of the native quarters. From the very inception of the settlements, Stamford Raffles had decreed that each street should be named appropriately, because signposting aided assessment and collection of public utilities rates as well as postal delivery and firefighting.9 Naming practices were governed by typical formulae: the names of administrators, place names, and geography; however, the native communities chose to organize their landscape after a wide range of everyday practices and associations. As observed by Brenda Yeoh, although the colonial government repeatedly sought to organize the street and place names, “it was the Asian populace who determined whether a particular assignment was adopted, ignored or substituted.”10 Due to the diversity of ethnic communities, all seeking geographic entitlements, several independent interpretations of the same landscape came into circulation. Plural naming practices through which the broader migrant categories are reified do exist and have been documented by H. T. Haughton. For example, Victoria Street had at least four different names: Au Be Chia Lo (Hokkien), at the back of Horse Carriage Street; Kampung Boyan Lama, the village of Boyan, a dialect group (Malay); Pal Kampam, milk village (Tamil); and in later years Kammangala Puthu Kuthu Madei Sadakku, Street of Kampung Glam new Hindu theater (Tamil).11 Albert Street was known as Kampung Bengkulu (Malay); Boh Mua Iu Koi (Hokkien),12 “the street where sesamum oil is expressed”; and Thimiri Thidal, “the place where people tread fire” (Tamil). Similarly, Market Street was known as Tiong Koi or “center street” (Hokkien) because it marked one of the divisions of the Chin Ge procession, but in Tamil it was known as Chetty Street after its traders from Chettinad. South Bridge Road was known as Tai Ma Lo,13 “the great horseway” (in Cantonese) in recognition of its importance in the colonial grid, but in Tamil it was Kalapithi Kadei Sadakku, “Cawkers shop street,” the street that housed the Indian Caulkers. They seemed to convincingly illustrate the lack of “a common social will,” one of the chief weaknesses of the “tropical” plural society.14 Nevertheless, although culturally distinctive, the naming practices could not always be partitioned so easily. The settlement of Indian migrants in Tanjong Pagar, adjacent to the Chinese community in Kreta Ayer or Toa Por (Big Town), during the early period and the late nineteenth-century spread of Chinatown to the area known as Sae Por (Small Town), adjacent to Kampung Gelam, provide incidences of cohabitation that are in turn reflected in naming practices.15 In fact, writes Dhoraisingam, on Telok Ayer Street at the center of Chinatown, the oldest Chinese (Hokkien) temple, the Thian Hock Keng, is flanked by two of the oldest mosques built by Tamil

160

hidden hands and divided landscapes

Muslims, the Nagore Dhurga and Al Abrar.16 Beside the Sri Mariamman Hindu Temple on South Bridge Road is the Jamae Mosque and nearby it, in Kampung Melaka, is the Omar Mosque. Upper Cross Street was known as the Kampung of Indians, Chulia Street was named after Muslim Tamils, and the Chettiar money lenders lived and worked on Market Street near Commercial Square. All the Indians working in the docks, moreover, resided in Tanjong Pagar, within present-day Chinatown. Immigrant histories were consequently interwoven in these spaces. The Hindu temple for Sri Mariamman was located adjacent to Pagoda Street, in Toa Por, the “pagoda” being the British name for the Kovil’s gopuram.17 Among the Chinese, the street was known as Kek leng kie Loi pai au (Cantonese), the back of the Kling place of worship,18 and by the Tamils as Kovil Pakkathu Sadakku, the side street by the temple. The British presence was also frequently acknowledged with names identifying the commercial square, the markets, Hill Street, at the foot of Fort Canning, and the police stations, each according to its administrative functions. These functions, however, were also reinterpreted according to native use, as evident in the naming of Church Street, Kiau Keng Kau—the mouth of the gambling houses!19 Haughton observes that although appropriate ethnic names were selected by the municipality for the Chinese and Malay parts of town, these were ignored and followed only by the police. The distinction between street and place is also noteworthy, alerting us to the manner in which the grid cut through broader systems of physical and social belonging and imposed urban values on rural associations. In Melaka, for example, despite the division of fort and native town, the urban streets fingered out into numerous kampungs where, due to the precolonial tradition of intermarriage, diverse communities already intermingled. The multiple kampungs depicted in A. H. Hill’s map of Melaka in 1800 suggests that the native town was an aggregate of villages made up of Eurasian (Serani), Dutch (Belanda), Chinese (China), Indian (Klings), and Javanese (Java) enclaves. Malay emigrants carried these associations with them to Singapore, identifying kampungs rather than streets and accordingly broadening the probability of replication and confusion. For example, Kampung Melaka was the name given to Angus Street, Cumming Street, Fisher Street, Kerr Street, Keng Cheow Street, Omar Road, and Soloman Street.20 Conversely, due to the organization of streets by ethnicity, George Town had an abundance of streets that were associated with ethnic communities, places of origin, or country of birth. Although kongsis, kampungs, and temples were the most obvious landmarks for place names, community identities prevailed. Some were recognized by the municipality and common to both Singapore and Penang, such as Armenian Street or Chulia Street, but others were spontaneous and fluid, responding to new waves of migrants. For example, in the Hokkien dialect,

the battle for the city

161

Argyle Road was Bangkali kang (Bengali Road), Chowrastra Road was Kiet leng a ban san (Kling Market Street), Chulia Street was Liet leng a ke (Kling Street), Cintra Street was Jit pun ke (Japanese Street), and Farquhar Street was Ang mo lo (Red Hair Road), the road of the Europeans.21 Unlike Singapore, where colonial categories threatened to homogenize ethnic groups, and immigrant communities were evasive and refused to acknowledge municipal names, George Town gathered multiple geographies and their connected ethnic identities into its street system. Consequently, kampung and street took on an exaggerated importance for the city’s inhabitants, delineating even the most minor ethnicities and dialect groups. European classification reiterated these relationships so that Kampung Java, Burma Road, Ceylon Road, Armenian Street, King Street, Queen Street, Chulia Street, China Street, and Amoy Lane were accommodated in the same geography.22 Whereas natives of Melaka produced hybrid rural enclaves and natives in Singapore produced alternative forms of pluralism, both defying the colonial

Figure 21. Penang’s street-based ethnic communities based on 1961 plan of George Town identifying those within the town precincts (drawn by author).

162

hidden hands and divided landscapes

urban plan, George Town’s competing migrant communities claimed their new geography as integral to their efforts at self-determination. As discussed previously, the relative political autonomy of immigrant communities and their reliance on their own chiefs and kapitans, under indirect systems of colonial government, differentiated Indian colonies from those in the Straits. Additionally, as argued by Wilfred Blythe, the Chinese who came from Kwangtung, Kwangsi, and Fukien (Guangdong, Guangxi, and Fujian) were from rural populations, suspicious of the state and dependent on local community organizations for their daily welfare.23 Thus, from the very early period the Chinese community established cultural organizations, such as kongsis, to manage the affairs of new immigrants. As discussed by Mak Lau Fong, the Chinese organizations were primarily institutions for maintaining occupational monopolies and managing labor flows, and they thrived under the excise farm economies established under colonial rule. They likewise shifted, due to changing economic pressures, from homogeneous associations based on dialect groups to heterogeneous organizations capable of managing various types of immigrants, including those of different races. They were organized through internal hierarchies under community leaders such as kapitans, t’ing-chus, and kang-chus and operated symbiotically with social and community organizations. Their kongsi houses often proved to be multifunctional institutional spaces that served both as temples/shrines and dialect associations. They were identified from an early period as secret societies, due to secret rituals of investiture into a “brotherhood.” The secret societies performed legitimate labor recruitment activities. In fact, the Chinese settlers preferred to operate via the secret societies, which provided the protections essential for continuing labor monopolies. Since the government did not offer a similar service, they had no other choice. The newly recruited laborers or sinkehs were escorted by samsengs (fighting men) to and from the emigrant vessels to kongsi houses where they awaited their employers.24 There is no doubting that the system was coercive. The sinkeh could not choose his occupation of preference and it usually took him up to three years to repay his debt and become a free man. As observed by Mak, without coercion it was unlikely that a sinkeh would stay with a job or a master he disliked.25 Among the Indian Muslims who came from South India, parallel religiosocial organizations called jumaah (modeled on Chinese associations) performed similar functions.26 They were run by hajis or penghulus (village headmen or elders) and formed associations, which were likewise linked with specific mosques and keramats (shrines). In fact, the Indian Muslim community that came originally from either the Coromandel or Malabar coasts of South India was the largest Indian community in the Straits until the 1880s, when they were

the battle for the city

163

outnumbered by Hindus brought for the indentured labor system.27 The Muslim Indians known as Chulia or Klings following marriages with Malays, formed the Jawi Pekan or Jawi Peranakan community, one of the dominant trading groups in both Melaka and Penang.28 By 1830 they had grown to number eleven thousand in Penang and were the most dominant immigrant community there until mid-century. Their history is contained within that of the Malay community due to their deliberate adoption of Malay identities in the late colonial period, which was facilitated greatly by intermarriage. They absorbed the convicts, many of whom were Muslims, and forged alliances with Chinese secret societies. What we have learned so far about the secret societies is their positive function for immigrant communities, a role played in consolidating group loyalties during the early period. “Symbiotic participation” between individual secret societies and other social, economic, and political organizations reduced the potential conflicts resulting from competition between groups.29 Conflict was largely about creating and maintaining occupational monopolies. Chinese secret societies fought over the rights to operate and control gambling and opium dens, excise farm contracts, and territorial rights. Moreover, due to the imbalance of sexes in the colony, the control of prostitution was an important monopoly and conflicts over women, particularly prostitutes, frequently led to confrontations.30 Since conflicts were manifested as spatial and temporal confrontations, their greatest impact was in urban space. While operational territories of Chinese secret societies are evident from street names or from the existence of kongsi houses and temples, the streets protected by them can be identified by the occupations typically found in that area. Mak notes the streets associated with secret societies: Ghee Hock Street (Carpenter Street), Hai San Street (Cross Street), and Ghee Hin Street (China Street) in Singapore; Ghee Hin Street (Church Street) and Old Ho Seng Society Street (Queens Street) in Penang; and Hai San Street (Jalan Hang Lekir/3rd Cross Street) in Melaka.31 The “Returns of Chinese Clubs” in Penang in May 1825 show their spread along Prangin Road and Ujong Passir.32 There are streets that have differential protection such as Amoy Street in Singapore, which was occupied by the Hakka (the upper half) and Hokkien (the lower half) secret societies, respectively, while Hokkien Street changed hands over time as is evident in its name changes—from Hokkien Horse Coach Street (until the 1840s) to Ch’ang-t’ai Street (1887–1888) and later Bean Curd Street, associated with the Cantonese.33 Understandably, these were the streets where economic activity was intense and where spatial encroachments might be interpreted as challenging occupational monopolies. In Penang, the Chulia lived in Chulia Street, Pitt Street, King Street (boatmen), and Rope Walk Street, and their associations were at the Rope Walk Mosque (Masjid Pintal Tali), at Acheen Street, Hutton’s

164

hidden hands and divided landscapes

Lane, and MacAlister Road.34 In fact, the Muslim-Indian Kapitan Kling mosque (1801) on Pitt Street was one of the earliest mosques in Penang. It is evident that although the Straits government had carefully calculated the imperatives of its urban plan, the native populations were, to a great extent, incognizant of these efforts. In their desire to give meaning to their new geographies, the migrants of each settlement devised their own mental maps for understanding its spaces against the widening network of communications that were imposed upon them. Urban activities that created horizontal alliances across ethnic groups were critical to the circulation of this knowledge because they Figure 22. Dato Koya shrine in Penang (photograph, distinguished the immigrant comauthor). munities from the Europeans. Religious beliefs and cultural practices would provide the most significant opportunities for ethnic interaction, outside the definitions of the colonial economic sphere. These were also the domains of secret societies that used festival processions to stage their social, political, and territorial interests. More importantly, they were the only arenas where the convicts, a group located quite separately in the European town or the prison, might engage with immigrant communities spatially. In fact, processions of convicts, sepoys, and Klings were often allowed in public streets when other groups were not.35 By holding religious festivals in urban space, convicts in fact forged social alliances and asserted their rights to the physical environment they were forced to build. Whereas caste had divided convicts in the Indian prison, religion, an arena equally impermeable to colonial government, created opportunities for collaboration in the Straits. There are many cultural institutions that demonstrate the affiliations forged by convicts. Former convicts built the oldest Hindu temple in Singapore, dedicated to Sri Mariamman (1827–1828, rebuilt 1843), and in 1864 it was served by a convict priest named Kristnayah who was respected by the Indian community.36

the battle for the city

165

The Dato Koya (Muslim) shrine in Penang was dedicated to Syed Mustapha Idris, who fled to Penang from Malabar to escape a false murder conviction.37 He worked as a construction worker and became a saint, miracle worker, and healer for the convict laborers. A Muslim Indian association in Singapore run by a convict, “Tomby Alee” (Thambi Ali), in 1864 attracted as many as 280 followers from the local Indian community.38 Perhaps the most powerful contemporary memorial to a convict is the Silat Road Gurudwar in Singapore, dedicated to Bhai Maharaj Singh.39 The convicts, as the group most protective of their collective liberties, proved the most animated among the festival revelers. They included Hindus and Shi`ia Muslims who celebrated both the Dusserah (Bengali Hindu) and Muharram (Indian Muslim) festivals. On completing their sentences, convicts were often absorbed by the Jawi Pekan community of “Straits born” Muslim Indians. The transportees saw festivals as legitimate opportunities to leave their lines or prison compounds at night and to parade the streets in a spirited and rowdy procession. Adherents from different faiths who indiscriminately participated in such processions contributed to their heterogeneous character. Moreover, as discussed in the previous chapters, the considerable liberties afforded to inmates by the penal system enabled them to temporarily claim the processional path executed by their own labor. The temporal spaces of religious celebrations generated multiple opportunities for entering the forbidden spaces of a segregated landscape. For these reasons, the festival most important to the convicts created a strategic opening for a long history of rebellious demonstrations.

The Muharram Festival In British colonies in Asia and the Caribbean during the course of the nineteenth century, a particular temporal event, the Shi`ia Muharram festival, became increasingly associated with riotous behavior. It spread with various forms of colonialism as first Moguls and then Indian Muslims carried its commemorative practices as far as Mauritius, Trinidad, Ceylon, and the Straits Settlements. However, the Shi`ia festival acquired different characteristics related to local society and politics in each new location, which transformed its form and purpose. In Bombay, as described by Jim Masselos, Muharram was the site for Sunni and Shi`ia rivalries.40 It has been argued that the Muharram festival in the Straits was of Indian origin, introduced either by Indian Muslim traders, the Madras native infantry, or transported prisoners.41 Muharram celebrated the core event at the heart of the Shi`ite religion by commemorating the historic battle at Kerbala42 (680 CE) when Husain, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, was martyred. This event

166

hidden hands and divided landscapes

led to the split between the Sunni and the Shi`ia regarding the authority of the Qur’an versus its interpretation by family members of the Prophet.43 During the festival, held for ten days in October, mourners in a symbolic funeral procession conveyed the tazia, the symbolic tomb of Husain, while the battle scene at Kerbala was enacted around them.44 Weeping, wailing, and self-flagellation were part of their symbolic expression of grief. The practice of “thakia” (dissimulation) and “Marthiya” (threnodies), which was part of the Shi`ia tradition, seemed to have expanded with Muharram and its successors.45 Noteworthy, however, is the diversity of participants due to close ties between Hindus, Muslim Indians, and Malays and due to the conflation of racial and religious categories within the larger geography. The culturally hybrid Jawi-Pekan were particularly prominent participants. In Muharram festivals throughout India and Malaya, mendicants, Hindu Yogis, frenzied devotees, and child carolers were sharply contrasted by fools, drunkards, straw dummies, and unbelievers. In a description of Muharram as celebrated by the Jawi-Pekans in 1858, J. D. Vaughan noted, They disguise themselves in a variety of ways to prove amusing, some dress as beggars of various nations, others as birds and beasts . . . some assume the attire of Europeans and dance various fashionable dances including the polka, . . . their love of fun and devilry leads them to imitate burlesquely all the ceremonies observed by the Mohamedans and Hindus of India to the amusement of bystanders.46

He also observed that they would playfully attack the more devout participants in Hindu or Muslim festivities, which led to blows and bloodshed. By the 1860s both the passion and its expression had combined in the Boria, a celebration of folk performances.47 The introduction of the Muslim Indian Boria and its transformation from a procession singing religious songs to a more secular choric theater may be attributed to increases in the numbers of immigrants and their confidence in their collective geography. The Boria theatrical groups were dispersed throughout the city and claimed various audiences before joining the main Muharram procession. A Boria troupe, consisting of a composer and groups of musicians and actors, was usually identified by its place of residence and the particular cultural attributes of the performers.48 Verses they recited were both temporal and geographical and typically explored either a cultural or character trait of a chosen “nationality,” such as Arabian, African, Albanian, or Moroccan, or depicted scenes from their everyday lives as students, farmers, fishermen, traders, or soldiers. The verses of the Boria demonstrated the significance of “place” in terms of kampung, street, place of origin, or ethnicity for asserting group identities during this period. According to Fujimoto,

the battle for the city

167

the shift from a religious to a theatrical performance was symptomatic of its Malayanization.49 Some of the stories that were enacted in Boria performances were of Persian origin and common to Muslims in India and Malaya. For example, a favorite among performers was the romantic story of Laila and Madjun (Leyli and Majun), a tale of unrequited love and madness from the Persian poetic tradition.50 However, as Muharram traveled eastward and transformed into the Boria it began to include European and Chinese characters.51 For example A. W. Hamilton gives the following translations of excerpts from the 1920s Boria in Penang, which included as many as fifty troupes from different sections of the city (see Appendix M):52 Melayu penyamun tanah Inggelis Malay thieves on English land Pantalon hitam baju puteh; Wearing black trousers and white shirts Sa-barang kerja Melayuh buleh The Malays can do any work Di-kebun Nyior Seri Majlis They can make this nyior (coconut) orchard   beautiful Troop Albania jajahan Itali Ibarat rimau mati berdiri Alatan dunia ta’ambil peduli Jalan Baharu sedia menanti

Albanian troops under Italy, As brave as tigers, die standing. They don’t care about the ways of the world They are ready and waiting at Jalan Bahru

Askar Yunan Kuantong sama, Soldiers from Yunan and Kuan Tong are   the same Sudah ‘resign’ daripada China; They left China Keluar menchari som, komkoma, Came out to find riches (make a living) Anak padang selamat sempurna This is a safe and perfect place for them

In the first example, a troupe from Dato Kermat Road parodies Europeans in their dress and facetiously describes themselves as Malays who have stolen English land. The troupes at McAlister Road and Padang Garam (Kimberley Street) express alternative national and cultural loyalties to Albania and to the triads from Yunan and Kuan Tong, but nevertheless affirm their satisfaction with their new geography.53 A particularly controversial act that appeared in several Boria performances was the Koli Kallen or Fowl Thieves’ Performance, which was held in broad daylight. It involved performers who wore dirty clothes and masks and chanted “who are the children of the fowl thieves?” thus celebrating petty criminality. It was also an opportunity for cross-dressing by male performers, who wore

168

hidden hands and divided landscapes

female attire with jewelry and anklets.54 A group of dancers dressed as tigers, who appeared in the Penang Boria, seemed to have borrowed its theme from the Chinese Tiger Festival, although tigers were also part of Muharram processions in India.55 The performative significance of such symbolic inversions and celebrations of marginalia suggested a reversal of traditional norms and a challenge to conventional forms of authority. For diverse groups of migrants competing for legitimacy, the performative appropriation of local geography had an added significance. A sense of geographic belonging had to be constructed and maintained through spatially defined cultural practices. The tension between colonial residents and settlers in a settlement colony was inevitably over such spatial entitlements. Festivals that foregrounded these issues were anathema to the colonial government because they reinscribed the colony’s public space through seemingly premodern traditions. No doubt, the buffoonery in native festivals resembled that of medieval carnivals in Europe that were intent on undermining social authority and its rationalization. In fact, the Times of India described the Muharram festival in Bombay in 1884 as a carnival.56 However, unlike in the Straits, Muharram in Bombay was a stage for rivalry between Sunni and Shi`ite Islamic factions, and between factions within these groups. In Jim Masselos’ opinion it was a heightening of hostilities that could not be transcended. Although similar internal divisions based on orthodoxy or fears of corruptive influences divided the community in the Straits, they were not institutionalized until the late 1800s. There are two other interpretations of Muharram cited by Masselos: Fruzetti, who sees it as integrating the whole Islamic community against the non-Muslim world, and Saiyid, who sees it as binding members of a locale into a socially cohesive network.57 Masselos disagrees with these interpretations and suggests that Muharram had a political function linked with a nexus of street-level power groupings or dominant figures. We may argue that the latter condition is evident in the Straits. However, whereas in Bombay Muharram was confined to Muslim areas of the native town and was regulated to prevent its dispersal into alleyways and side streets, keeping it within the range of the police, the festival in the Straits was not contained in this manner. Moreover, whereas Muharram in Bombay returned to its traditional semiprivate commemorative practices in the twentieth century, the festivals in the Straits persisted in public, demonstrating a form of geographic memory and interethnic affiliation that was decidedly modern. Muharram in the Straits had fused horizontal, place-based identities that ventured beyond medieval practices and parochial kinship alliances. Due to its emphasis on place-based group loyalties, both Muharram and the Boria were easily appropriated for the activities of religious and cultural societies that were competing for territorial dominance. The Boria, in particular,

the battle for the city

169

traced an alternative spatial knowledge of the European urban plan, through which local ethnic groups were able to negotiate their privileges. Although in combination the battle and the performance projected challenges to authority and seemed threatening to the colonial government, the native communities advanced their interests through dialogic means that avoided direct confrontations with colonial power. As a celebration of marginalia by affiliated religious and social groups, Muharram was an outstanding nineteenth-century urban performance. In a postmortem on nineteenth-century secret societies, Mervyn Llewelyn Wynne, a Penang policeman, emphasized links between Penang’s secret societies and the criminal element.58 He declared that prisoners transported from India, who were prominent in the Muharram processions, were linked to the Assassins, a Middle Eastern Shi`ite sect from the eleventh century.59 Wynne’s account vilified the Muslim Indian prisoners, many of whom were Shi`ites, as being connected to the Indian thuggee castes of bandit murderers. In his discussions of the Boria, Wynne took great pains to trace convict roots in the Koli Kallen or Fowl Thieves’ Performance, which he thought to be suggestive of their murderous tendencies. He failed to acknowledge the Straits governments’ role in encouraging the transportation of murderers because they required less supervision than thieves and were bound to labor for the term of a life sentence. Wynne was accurate in one respect. By the 1850s it indeed seemed possible to declare an additional link between the Indian, Muslim, and Chinese clan associations.

Secret Societies Efforts to trace an elaborate lineage for native practices, thus rooting them in premodern traditions, are symptomatic of orientalist accounts of native culture. This is particularly evident in twentieth-century discussions of Chinese secret societies recorded and analyzed by colonial policemen. Both L. F. Comber (1957, 1959) and M. L. Wynne (1941), of the Malayan police, trace the roots of the societies to the Hung brotherhood, the triads of South China.60 These writers describe the ritualistic initiation to the triad through nocturnal rites, secret signs, diplomas, language and passwords, and oaths of blood brotherhood. They also outline the severe penalties awarded for breaking the oath, resorting to the courts, reporting to the police, and informing on a murder.61 Wilfred Blythe, who wrote in 1969 following thirty years of experience in the Chinese Protectorate of the Malayan government, draws on these sources to offer a rigorous investigation on the sociopolitical context of unrest.62 These sources attribute the very first account of the hoeys to Abdullah, who in his Hikayat (chronicle) describes a clandestine visit to the jungle encampment

170

hidden hands and divided landscapes

of the Thian Tai Huey of Singapore in the early years of the settlement.63 Abdullah saw three large huts, each 180 feet in length with deep trenches eighteen feet deep cut in front of the entrances. He observed hundreds of lamps burning, men smoking opium, and pointed stakes and weapons lined up against the walls inside one of the huts. He was even privy (through a hole in the wall) to an initiation ceremony where a member was punished. In his estimation there were five to six hundred occupants in total. Abdullah’s account ends with an expression of the terror felt by local residents in kampungs Gelam and Dhoby, who were subject to attacks by this same hoey. He declares, “the Chinese robbed with unbridled licence in any quarter they pleased” and the lack of roads prevented their capture.64 In fact, proper policing would only commence with increases in convict numbers. The most intriguing aspect of the secret societies recorded by these colonial officers lies not in their historical lineage or mystical rituals, nor in the terror struck in local residents, but in their cultural imagination. Like the dramatic sequences of the Boria, the initiation into Chinese hoeys was orchestrated through a spatial drama inscribed by symbolic forms of place memory. In an exhibition held in November 1997, the Singapore History Museum recreated the lodge, based on initiation ceremony paraphernalia seized during police raids and collected by William Stirling, the assistant protector of Chinese in Singapore (1921–1931). The material corroborates much of the evidence gleaned from colonial sources.65 The wealth of symbolic objects, such as flags, abacuses, miniature pagodas, swords, Hung lamps, rulers, scales, mirrors, fans, scissors, seals, membership certificates, receipts, and entry tickets, are illustrations of the lodge and of the initiation ceremony. Accordingly, the grounds of the lodge are arranged to represent a walled city with three gateways, each made of bamboo or wooden posts with red paper stretched between them. First, items from the altar are transferred to various locations in the grounds, to sanctify them, then the initiate makes a journey through the gateways, symbolizing in order of progress the Hung Gate, the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness, and the Hall of the City of Willows, officially the entry to the lodge. The journey brings the candidate to the Red Flower Pavilion, where various symbolic artifacts are laid out on an altar. The master of ceremonies and society leaders would assume the roles of the heroic founders of the society in China, thus re-enacting and reaffirming the founding myth. A poem memorized by an initiate during the 1950s suggests the invocation of links to the Hung brotherhood. Holding in my hand three sticks of incense of longevity, Sworn brothers at the peach garden were Liu, Kwan and Chang,

the battle for the city

171

Tonight we come to the Flower Pavilion for initiation activity, The fame of the Hung Family will thence always be fresh and young.66

Such evidence, found by colonial police officers, undoubtedly led to their belief that traditional grievances and ideological discrepancies were carried and continued by immigrants arriving in the Straits, but, as argued by Mak, occupational monopolization led to a redefinition of brotherhood from an ethnic Chinese universalist notion to an economic particularist one.67 Although the rituals were based on a previous triad tradition and political ideology, they were sufficiently abstracted to serve a very different purpose in the Straits. As observed by Comber, “[i]n Malaya these articles [ritual artifacts] are nearly always symbolically represented by Chinese ideographs written in black ink on red paper.”68 The rituals of Chinese secret societies undoubtedly established systems of affiliation that placed clan loyalty above filial ties. Cultural institutions such as these benefited the southern Chinese immigrants, who left a beleaguered rural economy and political unrest in China. They came for jobs as coolies, traders, and miners and were occasionally absorbed into the artisan guilds as carpenters, goldsmiths, and the like. Although few settled in the Straits before 1874, by 1836 they numbered fifteen to twenty thousand, with the majority organized into secret societies. By 1854 the estimated number was twenty-four thousand in secret societies in a total population of thirty thousand Chinese.69 Due to the limited capacity of the Straits government, particularly in rural areas, these immigrants relied on their own protection, often to the detriment of those outside their brotherhood. Comber identifies their activities in Malaya as including the organisation of opposition to the government; the stirring of anti-foreign feeling; the formation of self-protection units against robber-gangs; the “protection” and extortion of money from hawkers and shopkeepers, hotelkeepers, prostitutes, labourers, opium and gambling dens; kidnapping for ransom; and the operation of criminal rings and rackets.70

Carl Trocki analyzes the activities of secret societies as struggles over economic resources in an unstable economic and political environment.71 They were far from independent of their wider social context, caught as they were “between the principles of capitalism upheld by the mercantile classes and those traditional economic principles that derived from . . . the moral economy of the peasant.”72 The dialectical struggle between capital and labor, moreover, may have been fought between secret societies or dialect groups or other divisions within the community, but they were, in his view, usually backed by the colonial state or a European mercantile faction.73 There are several contemporary authors who

172

hidden hands and divided landscapes

support this opinion, such as Lee Poh Ping, Mak Lau Fong, and Michael Godley.74 They pose communal unrest among the Chinese as conflicts between the colonial sociopolitical order and popular Chinese institutions. Lee in particular traces it to a struggle between the “pepper and gambier society” and “free trade society.”75 Trocki, however, attributes these conflicts to the very forces of free trade and rule of law so cherished by the British.76 In his view, the efforts made by British policemen to criminalize Chinese kongsis by attributing their animosities to ancient traditions from China are attempts at abrogating responsibility for disruption caused by British policies and the government’s instinctive hostility to organized labor.77

Hoey and Kongsi Although information on the activities of Chinese secret societies in Penang was first documented in the 1840s, from 1799 onwards kongsis were believed to be combining in attempts to cast off British subjection.78 In 1825 a plot was discovered between the Ghee Hin, Hai San, their compatriots in Phuket, and the Thai invaders of Kedah, where an attacking force of three hundred boats and around twenty-four thousand Thais, Malays, and Chinese, armed with muskets, were to be mobilized against Penang.79 At this time R. Caunter, the assistant superintendent of police, recorded the following seven secret societies: the Ghee Hin at Church Street; the Hai San in Ujong Pasir; the Wah Sang, Choong Chan, and Wai Chow/Hui Chou at Prangin Road; and the Yan Who and Yeng San at King Street. Their membership was largely Cantonese except for the Wah Sang, who were from the Hakka community. The evolution of these societies in Penang and their cultural flexibility reinforce Trocki’s arguments. The Hai San would later take on a Hakka identity. They would rise against the Ghee Hin in what would be known as the first Larut War (1862), when altercations between rival societies employed in adjacent tin mines, and the involvement of Malay chiefs, called for intervention by the Penang government. The Hai San would ultimately collapse into the Tua Pek Kong (Toh Peh Kong), which was founded in 1844 and was chiefly made up of Hokkiens and Straits-born Chinese Babas.80 By the mid-nineteenth century, the Chinese in the settlements stood at 75 percent of the population.81 Their allegiance was to ten distinct kongsis or clan houses. Bad feelings between clans such as the Teo Chew and Hokkien or the Macao and Keh invariably led to acts of violence. These clan-based activities gave independence to the Chinese public realm that in turn became threatening to the colonial government. For this reason Governor E. A. Blundell feared that “being antagonistic” to the British system of administering justice and “naturally

the battle for the city

173

desirous of attracting power and influence to themselves,” their existence was “dangerous to the welfare and comfort of the people.”82 However, there was little the Straits government could do to remedy the situation. Effective deterrents to the activities of the Chinese kongsis had to come from their own wealthier classes. Blundell argued, “The Chinese after all were not only the poorest coolies but also the wealthiest people in the settlements. Chinese merchants owned shops, had large houses of business, wives and families, and were intimately connected with Europeans in business transactions,” and it was not in their own interests to encourage such unreasonable outbreaks of violence. He pointed out that the antipathy of Malays, Klings, and Hindus toward the Chinese in the settlement and the exclusion from the clans of Chinese Roman Catholics was an added safeguard.83 Although the logic of the governor’s arguments held true for the earlier period, the 1850s had seen a shift in the nature of the violence. According to colonial reports, the island-wide massacre of Roman Catholics in 1851 had left five hundred dead, while riots in 1854 took six hundred lives and destroyed three hundred houses.84 The hoeys were competing with the Roman Catholic Church for recruits from among the Chinese migrants. Conflicts in Penang in 1858 and 1864 revealed that the Ghee Hin and Tua Pek Kong societies of the Teo Chew and Hokkien dialect groups were fighting for territorial dominance and controlling the smaller hoeys in the settlement.85 Following a confrontation in 1864, the administration rationalized their impotence in the face of growing belligerence. It argued that the Chinese seemed incognizant of European law and so it failed to act as a deterrent.86 How did everyday cultural beliefs and practices interact with the wider political economy? As argued by Sharon Carstens, in many of these accounts “culture” is often regarded as distinct and separate from the political and economic spheres.87 Yet migrant groups were not always guided by the economics of the plural society. In her view, the lack of evidence of an emerging class consciousness (cited by Nagata) suggests that cultural forms played an equivalent role in shaping ethnic responses.88 As demonstrated in the Boria, transnational influences, local identities, political constructions of ethnicity, and quotidian social practices impacted migrant communities in ways that evoked multiple and varied cultural responses. Interethnic collaboration and political interference during the mid-century period reveal that immanent, often hybrid, cultural and political expressions were strengthened through economic processes. Interethnic collaboration was not strictly an urban phenomenon, which suggests forms of peasant subaltern consciousness from a very early period, particularly in the Malay hinterland. In May 1859, when a Chinese hoey meeting at Tanjong Kling, an Indian village outside Melaka, was broken up through police intervention, an altar was discovered containing “nectar of union,” knives,

174

hidden hands and divided landscapes

books of regulations, swords, and banners.89 In the decade that followed, these alliances grew and spread through Melaka’s rural suburbs. Moreover, the several Malay sultanates, which bounded the British territories, often interfered in colonial processes. This was evident in the kingdom of Kedah, where Muslim kongsis were on the rise, an influence felt in nearby Penang, which was originally part of that kingdom.90 Emerging alliances between the Indo-Malay and Chinese societies, including Malays, Indians, Javanese, Boyanese, and Jawi-Pekans, meant that the government was dealing with hybrid cultural institutions, particularly during Muharram.91 With the gradual conflation of Indian Muslim/Malay and Chinese secret societies, the Straits government was alerted to a different threat that had political consequences. Whereas the immigrant communities appeared to be competing with one another until the 1850s, maintaining the categories marked out in the city grid, their combination of interests crossed city space and was potentially anticolonial. When the Chinese rioted, they mobilized large numbers of clan members both from within the city and from the outlying suburbs and destroyed much of the property in their wake. The outpourings of anxiety over property in particular, repeatedly documented in colonial reports, suggest the transformation of the city during the days of the riots. Rioting constituted a reinscription of European space through the differentiated ethnicities of the dual city. Not only did it completely marginalize Europeans, but it rendered the town unusable, due to large gangs of men armed with sticks and guns charging down city streets with the intention to loot and burn. European residents saw the “chaos,” previously attributed to the native quarters, spilling over into their territory and made various appeals to the authorities. In fact, their fears conjectured a form of “anarchy” that Furnivall, in later years, envisioned as the collapse of the plural society.92

Red Flag and White Flag The Straits government first became conscious of the threat of interethnic collaboration during the 1850s, following several incidents. In November 1859 firearms and gunpowder were discovered at an assembly at Parit Malana in Melaka in which one hundred Chinese and Malays were assembled.93 Similar affiliations became increasingly evident in Penang in 1863, when a fight between the Red Flag and the Tua Pek Kong culminated in an alliance “for offensive and defensive purposes.”94 A further alliance between the White Flag and Ghee Hin took place in 1865.95 In 1866 a body of Malays is said to have gathered with a view to attacking a rival party.96 The incident resulted in two cases of assault. Whereas prior to this period the government had depended on the antipathy of the groups toward

the battle for the city

175

one another, the 1850s and 1860s saw the hardening of interethnic alliances.97 As argued by F. S. Brown, a leading merchant in Penang in 1867, the Asian population had grown in “numbers, property and knowledge,” but “there was no corresponding increase in power and prestige of Government and Europeans.”98 The two Indo-Malay societies that allied themselves on either side of the Ghee Hin (Cantonese/Teo Chew) versus Tua Pek Kong (Hokkien) opposition were known as the White Flag (Bendara Puti) and Red Flag (Bendera Merah).99 Blythe describes them as made up of Indians (both Muslim and Hindu), together with Jawi-Pekans and a few Malays, but adds that no sectarian division between Shi`ia and Sunni sects was evident.100 Musa corroborates this fact, noting that they were initially formed for religious purposes, mutual benefit, and to safeguard the social needs of the Jawi-Peranakan and Indian Muslim communities. These communities, she observes, were formed by intermarriage between Arabs and Indians and local women.101 The Chinese immigrants influenced them because they were domiciled in adjacent areas and because of interethnic marriages among elite Chinese and Jawi-Pekan families. Musa identifies three main forms of Muslim involvement in secret societies: those solely involved in the Red Flag and White Flag societies, those who supported Chinese societies, and those who were members in both simultaneously. The latter did not take an oath but simply signed an agreement.102 There were also those who joined due to loyalty to their community leaders or because of their area of residence. Their usefulness for Chinese societies was primarily as assistants to those running gambling houses or places of ill repute, as branch assistants and in dealings with the police, the latter task being abhorrent to the Chinese. Association with the Chinese had also led to habits of gambling and opium smoking that was frowned upon by orthodox Muslims.103 Accordingly, it was normal for both Hindus and Muslims to celebrate festivals such as Muharram and Dusserah, and religious festivals emerged as the primary social arena for political activity.104 Muslim connections with secret societies would draw the Chinese community into such festivities and into modern interethnic affiliations. As observed by Mak, “the institutionalization of ceremonial meetings, processions, joint acts of worship and other rites and rituals function to generate trust among members and reinforce their cohesion.”105 The mock battles of Muharram were transformed into a bold display of society alliances where new spatial and economic territories were forged, defended, and fought over. The White Flag society was reported as being a religious society established ten to twelve years previously as festival performers.106 In the period spanning the outbreak of the mutiny in India in 1857, and the secession of the Straits Settlements from the Indian government ten years later, the Muharram festival transformed from a religious to a political event that

176

hidden hands and divided landscapes

became accessible to all the native population. Due to its convict origins and its rebellious character, it became the indices of territorial conflicts between native communities, which overrode the spatial authority of the colonial administration. Just as the urban policies of colonial government had carved up the city at its discretion, the native population redrew these territorial lines and gave them new political and cultural meanings, after their own terms. The festival frequently expanded into battles for the city that eventually evolved into armed confrontations between natives and colonizers. The convicts, as always, featured prominently in every incident, either taking the blame for the disruption of the peace or being called upon to police and capture the rioters. Throughout the 1850s, Muharram seasonally agitated a public landscape that was already rattled by sporadic disturbances. While festivities led to unrest in 1842, 1856, 1864, and 1867, these disturbances were contextualized within several other conflicts such as the anti–Roman Catholic riots of 1851, the great Hokkien and Teo Chew riots of 1854 and 1859, and the factional riots of 1863.107 Consequently, the government saw native festivals, funerals, weddings, or any form of collective gathering by non-Europeans as acts of insubordination. More importantly, as in the case of the 1856 festival, rioters took every opportunity to parade in the public streets of the European and commercial quarters. Two of these festival riots in particular coincided with significant changes in the political authority of the settlements.

Singapore 1856 In the early 1850s, rioting in Singapore respected the segregated urban plan prescribed by its administration. In 1854 rioting spread rapidly from street to street but was contained within the Chinese quarter.108 Fresh recruits from both countryside and tong kongs (boats) in the harbor rushed in to join the fray along Market Street and along the shoreline of Telok Ayer. When Governor Butterworth attempted to intercede, he was stoned unceremoniously by the rioting mob, which seemed unaware of his identity. On being confronted by both soldiers and convicts, the rioters fled the town and disappeared into the jungle.109 Despite their lack of success in apprehending rioters, the colonists preferred concentrated fighting within each native district. Rioting in European town space posed a different problem. The group that was best placed for disrupting the European settlement was the convict population, which was located at its center in the Bras Basah Road prison. On Wednesday night, 10 September, the streets of Singapore town were animated by a “public riot.” According to the Singapore Free Press, the “rioters” were a few hundred Indian convicts who were protesting a government ban on

the battle for the city

177

their religious festival.110 The convicts had “forced their way out of their lines and lighting their way by torches carried their ‘taboot’ in procession through the public streets to the house of the Resident Councilor and the Government Offices.” On reaching their destinations they “vented their displeasure by noisy cries and excited gestures.” Once the convicts had made their grievances known, they were persuaded to return quietly to the prison.111 This boisterous extravaganza, staged by the convicts, was significant because unlike all other native festivals, its point of origin was the prison inside the European settlement. Neither convict warders nor the relatively flexible penal system inhibited their quest for self-determination. Indeed, their noisy cries and excited gestures protested the initial prohibition of public liberties and declared their collective right of congregation. Whereas other communities made daring forays into European space, the convict procession erupted out of its very heart, making its very progress an act of transgression. The actions of the convicts opened up the procession for other rebellious activities, but also provoked European lobbies against transportation. The facility with which convicts traversed the European quarter during the 1856 riot, and their confident use of town space, must be attributed to the vast scope and public nature of their labor. The civic center was a territory legitimately associated with the Indian presence at that time. The daily tasks of convicts who constructed and maintained the colonial landscape dispersed them throughout Singapore town and proximate to other residential quarters. In fact, until 1856 their seemingly benign cohabitation had not met with any serious resistance. When Governor Blundell discussed that night’s events following the riot, he described Indian convicts as “harmless settlers.”112 Festivals were possibly the only times when convicts organized themselves into a visible and audible community. “In former years they were allowed to indulge in their saturnalia without restraint, their taboot was the gayest and their procession the noisiest to be seen on public streets,” reported the Free Press.113 In 1856, in deference to protestations by residents, the governor decided to impose certain limits on the convict festival. Not only did he require that festival activities remain within the convict lines, but he specified the classes of convicts that would be entitled to this “exemption from labor.”114 He observed that although during the recent Muharram festival a thousand convicts proved well-behaved, with no incidents of “disorderly conduct or drunkenness,” it was necessary to impose certain restrictions. He did this because “neither military, townspeople or convicts have a right to commit a public nuisance by disturbing the peace of the inhabitants and jeopardizing the lives of individuals.” It was “neither the province or desire of the government to interfere with religious festivals but [to] confine [them] to cantonments and temples.”115

Figure 23. Conjectured path of the 1856 riot in Singapore (based on newspaper accounts and overlaid on the 1857 plan of Singapore town by Narayanen in IOR: X/10178, British Library [drawn by author]).

the battle for the city

179

Despite its religious and cultural imperatives, the Act Regulating Public Processions and Assemblies was presented in 1856 as a municipal regulation.116 Indeed, it was enacted through the commissioner of police with the sanction of local government. Accordingly, all those intending “to hold public processions or assemblies” had to apply for a license, twenty-four hours ahead of time, from the relevant police commissioner. The act controlled the hours of public assembly, the movements around religious services, and even the routes and decorations reserved for public processions. Most importantly, the person whose name appeared on the license was held responsible for any breach of peace during the festival period.117 In August 1857, when the time of Muharram drew near, the local government repealed its original 1856 prohibition and decided to allow the convicts the liberty of parading the streets. Governor Blundell was convinced that “to refuse it would have the effect of needlessly exasperating the convict body” and would drive them “to acts of desperation more dangerous to the peace and good order of the town than those that occurred the previous year.”118 His reluctance to aggravate the convicts was influenced not by local anxieties but by a mutiny on the Indian subcontinent.

The Indian Mutiny The May 1857 mutiny of the Indian army led to large-scale insurrections on the Indian subcontinent directed against the East India Company. Although typically attributed to an incident where Hindu and Muslim soldiers were expected to bite on cartridges greased with animal fat (pig and cow lard), this minor religious issue became the catalyst for an extremely violent expression of longsuppressed animosities between the British company and its Indian soldiers.119 Dozens of jails were destroyed or broken into in the Northwest Provinces, Bengal, and the Punjab, and some twenty thousand prisoners were set free.120 News of the imminent insurrection reached Singapore long before it erupted through a network of fresh convict arrivals. Reluctant to bring the troops and convicts in Singapore into collision over “a religious question,” the governor redefined the earlier ban on the convict procession in terms that would seem more reasonable to the convicts.121 The convicts were once again free to celebrate Muharram albeit “restricted” to outside the walls of the lines, while the government withdrew its right to interfere. According to the governor, the convicts made no demands for the extension of the limit, seeming to be satisfied by the arrangement. However, the European and Anglo-Indian community grew afraid “that the convicts would break loose upon the town” and “the troops would not fire on them,” and they sent their female folk on-board ship for protection. Unexpectedly,

180

hidden hands and divided landscapes

the convicts themselves “declined to prepare a taboot” although this did little to allay the European community’s fears.122 The crisis of 1857 began a new era for Singapore that was to last for ten turbulent years. It began when the Indian mutiny brought an end to the East India Company. The Straits Settlements became directly answerable to the colonial government in Calcutta for the next decade, and this political arrangement further justified their penal status. The colony’s European residents protested vehemently against their continued association with criminals. In an 1858 petition to the House of Commons in London, the residents argued that “although Singapore was established exclusively as a commercial emporium,” the Indian government had been using it as a penal settlement. In their opinion the “felons sent here being those whose crimes are of the deepest dye, and their period of transportation of a lengthened nature, frequently for life,” such an arrangement would have disastrous consequences.123 The residents were “seriously apprehensive that the intention is to make it a penal station” and that “with such a large body of convicts there is no adequate provision for the protection of the life and property of the inhabitants.”124 According to their opinion, the relatively peaceful coexistence of Europeans and convicts would no longer be tolerable. The residents’ objections were primarily caused by anxiety over the receipt of political prisoners after the mutiny and the freedom that would be afforded them by the Straits penal system. In March of the same year a group of mutineers, who were being transported to Singapore, attempted to seize their transport ship en route. Such incidents exacerbated the fears of the residents and prejudiced them against transportation.125 They complained, The convicts are only guarded by a few Sepoy troops who in courage are far inferior to the desperados they are set to watch over.126 The system of convict management and discipline, has from the first, been of the most defective and loose nature. Large gangs of convicts are stationed at different parts of the island in open lines, and with only native officers or peons (themselves convicts) to control them.127

Moreover, the residents objected to the use of convicts in public offices. They declared that the convicts “style themselves servants of government and their behavior to the rural population is insolent and oppressive.” They had an “injurious moral influence on the local population” and were a source of “contamination.”128 In this manner, the European public in Singapore turned against the convict system that had served them for thirty-two years. Their concerns were mirrored in the prison administration, where the European warders were each provided

the battle for the city

181

with a belt and revolver thereafter.129 The convicts, who had once been seen as harmless settlers, were subsequently represented as a criminal caste, which had a malevolent effect on other immigrants. Based on this initial argument and due to their adoption of Muharram, a large section of the native public was criminalized over the next decade. The convict jail likewise expanded its disciplinary reach by spawning a reciprocal increase in police stations.130 When the main roads to the country were completed in 1867, no fewer than twenty-eight police stations serviced Singapore’s eighteen villages.131 The colonists’ prejudices were not unfounded, however, for the festival had transformed considerably in its accommodation of Chinese associations.

Penang 1867 In the period between the Indian mutiny and the transfer of the colony, activities in the Indo-Malay secret societies gradually escalated. In Singapore, the Red Flag and the White Flag had several confrontations during Muharram processions. In January 1864 an association for providing funds in circumcision, marriage, or funeral festivities, begun by the convict Tomby Alee (Thambi Ali), was found to be inciting its competitors and maltreating its ex-members.132 In 1865 it was discovered that the Red Flag had penetrated the police force through Jemadar Vardarajen, a gang leader from India, and was using a complex system of bribery to buy immunity from the officers.133 The Red Flag members used their authority to determine the routes for their Muharram processions and encouraged police peons to persecute rival White Flag members. Bribes, offered to Vardarajen by association members, included “silk sarongs and handkerchiefs, cutlery, goods, watch, pictures, beer, porter, spirits, muttons, fowls and ducks,” and to police officers Robertson, Hayward, and Barnum, “pork, hams, muttons, drinkables, gown pieces for ladies and toys for children, and a silk umbrella with sixteen steel ribs.”134 When Mahomed Dubash, who had been the principal organizer of the Red Flag in Penang, joined the society in Singapore, he was believed to have criminalized it further. Officials also suspected that the said society was allied to the Ghee Hin and Ghee Kok societies.135 Moreover, the methods by which the leaders extracted tributes or taxes for the society had imposed “excruciating melancholies” on the Indian population, according to as many as 250 petitioners.136 The culprits were indicted for conspiracy on 14 October 1865 and sentenced to two years in the house of correction.137 Following a series of associated riots, the government refused to issue festival passes for Indian festivals. On 12 October 1865, it was noted in the Singapore Free Press that

182

hidden hands and divided landscapes

The Mohurrum processions have been suppressed and if this of the Hindus shares the same fate we shall be happily rid of two intolerable nuisances. We hope to see the Chinese processions next attacked . . . for the Chinese are as addicted to riots as they are to gambling and opium smoking.138

The attack, however, was to be carried out by the Chinese associations during Muharram, in George Town, Penang. The battle for George Town could be seen as a struggle for social and spatial pre-eminence by a section of its citizens. The Penang riots of 1867 were a confrontation within the Chinese, Malay, and Indian ethnic groups, to the exclusion of the Straits government. The marginalization of colonial residents was a gesture of defiance, just as the embattled urban space was a challenge to imperial authority. The Penang riots of 1867 demonstrated how the non-European inhabitants of Penang used the colonial urban grid strategically for their self-determination. The map of the city as understood by the associations is difficult to decipher. However, we can imagine it through its capillary dispersal of power. In Penang, the network contained within the urban grid had potential points of conflict in the kongsi houses, the temples, and the homes of the prominent clan members. The kongsi wars carved this grid into large and small territories with embattled boundaries, areas of dispute, and spaces of infringement. With alliances being formed between Chinese kongsis and Indo-Malay societies, a different set of circuits came into operation. The rioting typically broke out between the Ghee Hin kongsi on Church Street, at the center, and the Tua Pek Kong kongsis on Armenian Street, south of the gridiron. The clan territories abutted Lower Pitt Street, which acted as a western boundary to the gridiron and was (conveniently) the street of undertakers. Not only did the clans have counterparts in the provinces, but by 1867 they had allied themselves with outlying Indo-Malay associations. The White Flag society led by Tuan Chee had its base at the Rope Walk Mosque (Masjid Pintal Tali) and was composed of Malay, Kling (Indian), and Jawi-Pekan rope spinners and cart drivers. Their opponents, the Red Flag society led by Che Long, was located to the south on Acheen Street near the Tua Pek Kong and Khoo kongsi houses. Hutton’s Lane and MacAlister Road housed association houses of other Klings and Jawi-Pekan communities, whose kampungs were located on the west of the settlement. These were all potential centers of fighting, both at the heart of George Town, as well as southward and westward. A verse from an old Boria song, quoted by Khoo Su Nin, gives us a description of the Tua Pek Kong and Red Flag alliance.139

the battle for the city

183

Kampong Che Long, Khian Che Long’s Village, Khian Tek Kongsi Teik kongsi Taukeh, Ghee Hin sudah mati, The Ghee Hin Leader is dead Tiada tiru, sendiri reka, We do not follow, we are independent Kampong Che Long, Kompani Che Long’s Village, Our own Company Kita.

The verse declares that the singers are part of an alliance between Che Long’s kampung and the Khian Teik kongsi; they challenge the Ghee Hin and assert their autonomy in forming their own company. Che Long, the subject of their allegiance, was the leader of the Red Flag society during the Penang riots. His kampung in Acheen Street was in the heart of Red Flag territory south of the gridiron street system. The Hokkien, Khian Teik kongsi, whose base was at the Tua Pek Kong temple in nearby Armenian Street, was allied with the Red Flag. By additionally proclaiming the real or symbolic death of the Ghee Hin leader, the singers named their primary opponents.140 Not only does this verse identify the instigators of the Penang riots but it shows us how the “Muslim Indian” festival was being publicly used to proclaim interethnic alliances.

The Battle for the City Rioting commenced at the beginning of July 1867 and George Town was immobilized for a ten-day period.141 As in previous conflicts, rioting broke out initially in the gridiron streets of the commercial center.142 Fighting commenced on Beach Street, on Bishops Street and along China Street, reiterating the grid of the European settlement. Rioters organized themselves in two large detachments. Brandishing sticks and knives and firing muskets, they advanced along Beach and Market Street at one end of the Ghee Hin quarter. Unlike the previous riots, however, the fighting was no longer pedestrian in nature. During the Penang riots of 1867, the society members were mounting and firing small cannon from the rooftops of adjacent houses.143 By firing across the city, the associations marked out territories above its orthogonal footprint and in defiance of its street-based spatial order. The center of bombardment was Armenian Street, which housed the five main Hokkien clans, while Cannon Square was so named after receiving one of the government’s cannons. The circular window at the Acheen Street mosque is likewise attributed to a cannon fired from the minaret.144 Next, fighting spilled over beyond the city grid to the suburbs and the provinces, where villages were looted and burned. Timber and attap kampung houses easily succumbed to the flames. Red Flag Malays set fire to the Indian Muslim

184

hidden hands and divided landscapes

Figure 24. Conjectured path of 1867 riots in Penang (drawn by author).

kampung near Chulia Street on the southern boundary of the gridiron. The fighting even spread as far as Jelutong and the Ayer Itam valley, a Chinese settlement on the far south of Penang, and prisoners had to be sent to these areas to try and contain the violence. During the ten days of rioting, the town remained immobilized, with the remaining residents interred within their houses. However, since the two societies collectively commanded a membership of twenty-nine thousand souls, we may imagine that participation in the riot was also considerable.145 The 1867 riots saw the Europeans imprisoned within their own grid, while the societies defied colonial spatial determinants. The town’s artillery was away on a military expedition, so the defense of administrative and commercial buildings fell to the remaining soldiers, policemen, and European residents. They initially barricaded Church Street and Armenian Street, the rival kongsi territories, until the city boundaries came under threat from provincial Chinese assailants. Pickets were next erected on Prangin Road and at Beach Street, but fighting continued regardless.146 The

the battle for the city

185

British had to await supplementary troops from Singapore to put an end to the violence. Despite the ferocity of the riots, it proved difficult to ascertain casualties because the dead bodies of the Chinese were speedily borne away by clan members for secret burial. There were no casualties amongst the Europeans.

The Aftermath of the Riots Under Act no. XXI of 1867, a commission was appointed to study the causes of the Penang riots and to prepare a report.147 Accordingly, it was suggested that the murder of a Malay diamond merchant by one of the Red Flag members had initially led to a confrontation between the Red and White Flag Malays during the Muharram festival.148 The report described how Chinese groups had supplied arms and precipitated the escalation of violence. In evidence given by different communities at the criminal sessions, it appeared that both the Red Flag and White Flag society members had agreed to outline the terms of their association and had made their agreement in Tamil and put their signatures in both Tamil and Malay. Hindu Tamil names such as Mootooswamy (Muttusamy), Annawashee (Annavasi), Aramoogan (Arumugan), and Ramasamy, among those convicted, further substantiated the mingling of both ethnicity and religion.149 The two sons of the most important Indian Muslim trader in Penang, Mohamed Merican Noordin, were implicated.150 Armed with its report, the Straits government used it to justify a series of new ordinances to control public congregation and manage private property. The issue of spatial entitlements and investments remained their primary motivation. The

Figure 25. The barricades (Penang State Museum and Art Gallery, West Malaysia).

186

hidden hands and divided landscapes

Privy Council sanctioned an “Act for the better preservation of the public peace 1867,” which enabled a district to be proclaimed and disarmed in the event of a disturbance.151 It additionally declared that those who committed acts of violence as “duty to their society” could be excused, but that looting and plundering could not be forgiven. Acts against property were considered more criminal than acts of intentional violence. Moreover, each society was to compensate the other for their mutual losses. The actual execution of sentences proved impossible, however, since the government depended entirely on maintaining the good will of the local traders.152 Khoo Poh, one of the primary culprits, a leader of the Tua Pek Kong association, had his sentence of deportation rescinded when it was discovered that he was a naturalized British subject. His partner in crime, Khoo Thean Teik, another leader of the same society, was sentenced first to death, then to life imprisonment, and was released after seven years. Numerous petitions were brought forward against witnesses in the criminal cases, and prominent traders held the government to ransom over the fate of their associates.153 The urban spaces of the independent colony would witness even greater conflagrations in the years that followed. More critically, the Straits government could no longer depend on turning one race against the other. As if in response to hardening opposition, the riots in Singapore during 1871–1872 were peculiar for their organization and persistence. The Chinese secret societies were conscripting Portuguese and other Europeans in addition to fresh immigrants from among the Indians and Javanese.154 Moreover, the native traders had developed a strategy of closing down shops at the slightest ruse and immobilizing the colonial government.155 It seemed that the diverse ethnic communities had consolidated their efforts despite their spatial segregation. Where the conflation of European and native territory in Penang had provoked a “battle for the city,” interethnic alliances across segregated spaces in Singapore cast the entire settlement as the field of battle. The European town, which occupied the neutral expanse between competing ethnic neighborhoods, with its wide roads, open spaces, and battle-ready soldiers, became the arena of choice. The Rocher plain, the Circular Road, Kampung Gelam, Kampung Melaka, and the waterfront on Beach Road from Clyde Terrace to Rochere and Telok Ayer were among the sites for the 1871 riots.156 Although the report on the violence depicted fragmented and unruly attacks with incidents occurring all over the colonial map, rioting followed a familiar pattern. Unlike the previous riots, where participants fought at night to escape detection, the Chinese now chose “to fight in the morning after they have eaten.”157 The troops who were stationed at strategic points with the task of defending the European town found their progress obstructed by a “gathering of people staring to see what the red coats looked like.”158 The interaction in broad

the battle for the city

187

daylight of enthusiastic rioters, an accompanying native audience, and waiting red coats produced a colonial urban performance. The carnival, which had originated as a “pageant without footlights” or audience, had gradually evolved into a representation of native interests, which boldly tested the authority of the Straits government.159

Conclusion The Muharram riots of 1867 marked an important year in the Straits Settlements when its government was transferred from India to the Colonial Office in London. With increasing Chinese immigration and British interference in the South China Sea, the administration of the Straits Settlements had reoriented toward the Southeast Asian region.160 Political autonomy from India affected both the urban administration and the colony’s penal status.161 The Straits government decided to replace convict peons with bona fide law officers and intensify troops and armaments. Native unrest was to continue to escalate for the next twenty years regardless. As described by Brenda Yeoh, by 1888 rioters were attacking members of the European and other communities and the riots were described as “an organized resistance to the law of the land.”162 Whereas the native populations had remained opaque or invisible to the colonial public in the earlier years, in the latter half of the nineteenth century they gained visibility by disrupting “everyday” colonial space. Riots, like the processions they had once defended, had developed during the course of the presidency period into a form of public spectacle. The penal geography and the urban grid had failed to regulate the settlements’ physical spaces, and its population had overrun colonial ethnic dividers. The immigrant communities appeared to be forging a dialogic relationship and a “common social will” against colonial government. Secret societies, religious processions, and the knowledge of the colonial landscape that came with the penal inheritance collectively reinscribed the city with their own spatial authority and patterns of resistance.

C HAPTE R 7

The Citadel

Once the Straits Settlements were declared a crown colony in 1867, with Singapore at its head, Penang and Melaka diminished in significance. Singapore grew in autonomy and stature, no longer one of many stations on the colonial circuit for a host of petty officials. It also ceased to be one of the coveted sites along a chain of colonial penal stations. Following the riots of 1867 a surfeit of acts regulating secret societies was imposed on the immigrant populations. They included the Dangerous Societies Suppression Act no. XIX of 1869, followed by the Dangerous Societies Suppression Ordinance of 1882 and the Societies Ordinance of 1889, which by degrees forced registration on all secret societies. The Banishment Ordinance that accompanied these acts ensured that all convicted expatriate criminals would be banished.1 It was possible to regulate societies in this manner because a new class of Straits-born Chinese elite, educated into Western ways and loyal to the British, had distanced itself from the secret societies, accelerating the separation between these former institutions and the community.2 Similarly, the Muslim religious leaders appointed by the government were directed to suppress the secret societies within their community, and a fatwa was issued against joining their Chinese equivalents.3 Once they withdrew their support and resources, alternative communal organization began to replace these earlier models. In our exploration of the history of the Straits Settlements so far, the discursive practices of the native population could be traced both through official discourses and in the responses of various immigrant communities. These very different forms of knowledge were read against and often contained within various manifestations of the grid, the most immediate being the several acts limiting immigrant activities. Revenue systems, urban templates, colonial institutions, and various forms of cellular architecture provided spatial and material manifestations of the regulatory grid and were used to organize ethnicity, land, 188

the citadel

189

and labor. Although their outcomes were often violent, confrontations between immigrant groups were not always dialectical, due to the freedoms associated with settlement and varied manifestations of culture. In short, due to opportunities to transgress the grid and yet engage with the very criteria of it, the colonial environment remained open to redefinition by natives. Perhaps because of its ambivalence and desire to disguise asymmetrical relationships between colonial and colonized, the grid demanded of convicts numerous incompatible roles as policemen, protesters, and rebels. They were simultaneously marginal and central to the project of governance. As observed by Barbara Babcock, “[w]hat is socially peripheral is often symbolically central,” and the subject that is central to a culture is always structured in relation to its inverse.4 Conversely, artificial hierarchies imposed on grid space provoked reactions and responses from both convicts and immigrant communities that ultimately destabilized its urban center. The convict population was both a sign of colonial authority and subjection to it, troubling to bourgeois ideas of morality and urban democracy, an uneasy signifier of the colony’s racial politics and a threatening presence within the community. Convicts had to be removed from the colony. The colonial subject that emerged out of this process of political change and autonomy would be marked by a different kind of abstract institutional violence that is inscribed on the body of each citizen. He or she was produced through a series of structural adjustments to the public sphere. The grid of the plural society was recast at an individual level while the increasing numbers and role of the military augmented the government’s authority. With political autonomy and increasing bureaucratization, the mobility of colonial subjects was limited and they were caught in a surfeit of governmental systems. Moreover, previous penal policies appeared liberal in comparison with the policies for indentured plantation labor that replaced them. Singapore’s growth in authority and stature did not have a positive impact on its urban environment. Instead, we can observe the opposite effect. Whereas previously colonial urbanism had segregated the native communities from the city grid and cast them in the marshlands outside it, subsequent encroachments by immigrant neighborhoods pressed in upon the city boundaries. Just as the two-dimensional grid of the map attempted to but could not flatten the settlement’s uneven topography, the administrative grid could not neatly categorize diverse and fluctuating immigrant numbers. The invisible barriers of colonial liberalism were proving ineffective against a swelling native population. New physical and spatial strategies for constructing European authority and social difference had to be planned. Indeed, it seemed as though many of the original colonial objectives that were instituted with the urban plan were being reversed.

190

hidden hands and divided landscapes

It was through a series of reactionary revisions and resolutions that the colonial government summoned the end of penal transportation. The tasks performed by penal labor could no longer be calculated into annual budgets or used to increase profit margins in various colonial departments. Alternative sources of labor had to be encouraged, accounted for, and controlled in categories that were more easily conflated with immigrant settlers. When, with independence from India, individual governable citizens needed to be shaped out of the colony’s plural society, the Straits government turned away from Singapore’s troubled public landscape to its new cellular prison. This chapter completes our scrutiny of the period of penal transportation through which a particular urban history of Singapore has been recovered. The political changes during the transfer years were embodied in three architectural interventions that suggested the defensive introversion of the independent settlement. The first of these was a series of battlements provoked by the threat of mutiny and constructed from 1858 onwards on various hillocks encircling Singapore town. The second intervention was in radical alterations to the colonial jail at Pearl’s Hill, which was transformed into a holding facility for local prisoners. The final architectural imposition, at great cost to the colony, was the Government House on Prinsep’s Hill, the magnum opus of convict industry. All three interventions were on elevated sites overlooking Singapore town and were built with convict labor. Indeed, these were the last tasks that convicts would undertake in the Straits. On the one hand, it seemed that during this period the image of colonial authority was being usefully reinforced against that of an unruly native population. On the other hand, the public activities of a penal workforce had inverted colonial hierarchies and unleashed collective forms of belligerence, which confined and contained the European residents in their elevated institutions and their battlements. It appeared that the process by which the different communities negotiated their place-based identities had produced a different urban social context than that anticipated or desired by the colonial government.

The End of Transportation Despite glowing accounts of the productivity of convict labor in previous prison reports, by 1869, with increasing numbers of local felons, there were arguments against the imperatives of the system. They debated the European system of rigorous and unproductive labor as preferable for the reform/punishment of local prisoners. The prison superintendent, J. F. A. McNair, desperate to maintain the existing penal labor system, argued against unproductive labor on the basis that the native had no “capacity of feeling any regret at his penal

the citadel

191

labor being useless.”5 In the House of Lords, however, there was a new climate of reform that saw any attempt to economize by using prisoners for industrial labor as sacrificing effective punishment. “Hard Labour, Hard Fare and Hard Board” was the basis of prison reform in Britain in the 1870s, and the Prison Act of 1877 centralized all prisons and prison administration under the Home Office.6 For London, modern penology was, increasingly, a discussion about deterrence and retribution.7 Although the system of transportation in the Straits was undoubtedly sensitive to these changes, it was competition between metropolitan and colonial interests that brought on the system’s final collapse. From then on, the legal system and the military, in combination, would play an increasing part in colonial governance and the pacification of natives. Several ordinances enforced by the colonial government after 1867 were directed at criminality. They included ordinances for executing criminal justice, controlling Chinese and other dangerous societies, preserving peace, reorganizing the prisons of the colony, dealing with gambling houses and gamblers, and remodeling the police force. They were also directed at health and hygiene, vaccination, quarantine, and preventing the spread of contagious diseases. The anticipated end to the penal labor supply provoked changes in excise laws and increases in taxation.8 As the prison changed its form and purpose, the penal geography in the Straits was displaced by yet another model of confinement, the industrial plantation. It is important to recollect that colonization in itself, that is, the colony, was originally conceived in terms of potential trade and revenue from agricultural surplus.9 Even as the Straits government increased its defenses and rid itself of its transportees, it introduced the plantation economy and the indentured labor system as comparatively liberal systems.10 However, an actual comparison between the two systems of labor suggests otherwise. Despite the “freedom of contract” that indentured workers were offered on plantations, supervision was top down and training was neglected. Moreover, far greater numbers of laborers were arriving in the settlements.11 Plantation labor was gripped in an abstract system of bondage, measured in fixed contracts and according to labor invested.12 There was no possibility of advancing within the system, acquiring a ticket of leave, or having the sentence revoked through good behavior. Although the plantation industry generated surplus for sale and accumulated capital, it fell short in methods of production. Whereas industrial capitalism was predicated on increasing productivity, the plantation economy depended on labor-intensive production methods, reproducing the dual economy.13 By confining laborers on his property and controlling them either through the exploitive terms of the labor contract or by exerting force, the colonial planter merely reproduced feudal employment patterns.14

192

hidden hands and divided landscapes

Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the appalling conditions of labor and its maltreatment by private individuals became an issue for the colonial government.15 During recruitment, laborers would be cooped up all day in a godown and taken out under guard, “like prisoners, morning and evening; to walk and sit as their keepers bid them.”16 The plantations operated as gated communities where laborers had little recourse against injustices suffered at the hands of their European masters. Sickness, poor living conditions, and high mortality rates provoked inquiries and condemnations of the system.17 Leaders of the old Indian Legislative Council described the indentured labor system as “iniquitous and based on fraud and maintained by force, a great blot on the civilization of any country that tolerates it.”18 It seemed far less humane than the system of penal labor. Transportation from India ceased in 1860 and was officially ended by 1867.19 Transportation of Europeans had ceased earlier, in 1849, and transportation of females had ceased in 1857.20 The system of association endured for half a century following the abolition of transportation in Britain (1857) and in India (1868), with extramural labor conducted until the 1920s.21 By 1870 there were 2,754 prisoners in the convict jail in Singapore, of whom 678 were on ticket of leave away from the prison.22 Life convicts from all three settlements were brought to Singapore and transported to Port Blair in the Andaman Islands (from which many in fact returned to the Straits). Those with unexpired sentences remaining in the prison were given the choice of release or repatriation in lieu of the final dismantling of the establishment in April 1873. The last batch of 114 convicts left the settlements on 8 May 1873, by the vessel Paknam.23 Of them, 68 were transferred to the Andaman Islands, 33 to Ceylon, and 13 to Madras to complete their sentences; 1,726 TOL convicts and 125 invalids remained at the settlement. Meanwhile, the European public in Singapore realized their hard-won ambition of ridding merchant interests of the stigma of transportation. The urban conspicuity of prisoners that had paved thoroughfares for urban rebellion was to be eradicated altogether. Meanwhile, throughout this period, the Straits government applied itself to new strategies for strengthening its defenses against increases in the immigrant population.

The Defenses Demographic changes in the settlement of Singapore began to have political implications as the native secret societies multiplied and new recruits were sought among new migrants. The natives were now in a position to assert their rights as free settlers and manipulate their collective economic advantage, which was indispensable to the colony’s development. The Chinese, being in

the citadel

193

the majority, were able to vote their favorites in as municipal commissioners, whereas the other communities had no chance of success.24 As described by Brenda Yeoh, from the 1880s onward municipal governance was the new site of negotiation and contestation.25 The segregated ethnic neighborhoods with their narrow, crowded streets proved advantageous in concealing a resurgence of political activity that proved threatening to European settlers. The British initiated new urban strategies to counter this resurgence, strategies that involved moving inland and upwards. Whereas administrators, intent on segregating ethnic neighborhoods and dividing property for taxation, had conceived the original urban plan for Singapore, the 1850s saw them reorganizing this same plan for military purposes. Following the mutiny in 1857, the Indian government halted all expenditure on public works, including the Government House, which was stopped at foundation level while being reconstructed on its original site. Funds were instead diverted to strengthening the existing military defenses.26 Whereas the earlier defenses in 1844–1845 and 1852 had been erected for the protection of New Harbor against foreign aggression, they were now oriented toward “intestine commotions.”27 The chain of hillocks that had bounded the city on its northwestern boundary, preventing expansion inland, now proved advantageous as a chain of battlements. From this elevated position, both the administration and the military could gain a visual and strategic advantage over the activities of the town and could anticipate its growing insurgence. The map that had been conceptualized in relation to river, marsh, and hillock was redrawn as an aerial view of an occupied territory, which the government sought to control using military power. In their military history of Singapore, Murfett et al. observe that from 1820 to 1850 the only real threat to Singapore was from piracy, the details of which can be found in Carl Trocki’s book on the Temenggongs of Johor and Singapore.28 In fact, none of the defensive works envisioned by Raffles were built. Unlike Melaka, which had its Portuguese fort and Fort Cornwallis in Penang, which was built with convict labor, Singapore had depended on divisive urban strategies rather than man-made defenses; in fact this was a key attribute of its modernity. More importantly, such defenses had previously been built for the military of the East India Company rather than for the colonial government. Although Captain Lake of the Bengal Engineers provided a report in 1827 recommending both protection of the harbor and a hilltop citadel, the only outcome of it was the building of Fort Fullerton.29A proposal to fortify New Harbor by Captain James Bart of the Madras Engineers in 1843 only resulted in the construction of a sea wall around the same fort.30 In the absence of any threat from a greater power in the region or a foreign navy, the defense of Singapore was not considered a priority. In fact, until 1854 there appeared to be no cause for concern.

Figure 26. Defenses at Singapore (based on 1868 and 1878 plans of Singapore town, PRO CO 78/2425, 2 & 3, UK: National Archives, Kew [drawn by author]).

the citadel

195

In 1854 the Crimean War, the presence of the Russian navy in the South China Sea, the Taiping rebellion, and riots among Singapore’s Chinese societies collectively compounded the anxieties of the British population.31 The second opium war of 1856 and the Indian mutiny were additional factors in the years that followed. From among these, internal conflict was the greater cause for concern. The Chinese, who had formerly been praised for their industry, had proved to be “an un-warlike but a turbulent and riotous population bound together in secret societies” and allied with Malays and Indians.32 Areas north of the grid, where a flood of new Chinese migrants had settled, grew to be the most turbulent part of the town, and the first signs of Sae Por (Small Town), adjacent to Kampung Gelam, made its appearance.33 By the 1860s the Ghee Hin and Ghee Soon kongsi houses were located in Lavender Street, Jalan Sultan, and Kampung Gelam, suggesting that the plural ethnic categories had begun to blur.34 In response to these demographic shifts, a “space for the shelter of Christian inhabitants in the event of internal disturbance” had become an urgent necessity for the Straits government.35 Even as the colonial public was being shaped by the new institutional landscape, it was fighting with native settlers over public space. Recognizing that in the event of an urban riot the ruling minority was at a disadvantage, the government designed extensive battlements at Fort Fullerton and at Mounts Faber and Palmer, at elevations overlooking Singapore town, as places of refuge for European settlers. The openness implied by the ideology of city space proved disadvantageous to the city’s founders, and in a curiously retrogressive move, European settlers sought self-segregation. This reversal of urban policy was framed by a series of public debates during which colonial residents formulated strategies to reassert their authority and reclaim their lost settlement. While it was agreed that a citadel as a place of refuge was indeed necessary, there was considerable argument as to its location. A debate ensued as to the relative merits of various inclined sites as yet uninhabited. Requests for new defenses also included pleas for the addition of European artillery to further suppress native insurgence.36 Unsure of the reliability of Indian troops following their mutiny in 1857, and no longer confident of convict loyalties, European settlers decided that European troops were essential for the government’s security. In debates on the defenses, the opinions of military engineers brought down from Madras differed considerably with those of the colony’s own administrators.37 The former were intent on orienting the defenses seaward, to protect British naval and mercantile interests.38 The latter, including Governor E. A. Blundell, driven by a concern for local anxieties and expenses, were bent on internal fortifications. The two sites that were debated were Government Hill at the rear of the European town and Pearl’s Hill on its southern side adjacent to the military

196

hidden hands and divided landscapes

cantonment.39 Government Hill had Government House at its summit and commanded a view over Kampung Gelam, whereas Pearl’s Hill, which overlooked Toa Por, was the site of the H.M. Jail (the civil jail used for European convicts). The choice was consequently between two sites of colonial authority. Arguably, at a pragmatic level, the choice of Pearl’s Hill would save the government the cost of moving Government House and increase surveillance over Chinese settlers.40 The governor’s initial development of Pearl’s Hill was thwarted by Captain George Collyer, a Madras military engineer, who proposed to fortify both these sites as well as New Harbor at a cost of £400,000.41 Fortifications consisted of batteries on each of the hills, detached batteries for the defense of the roadstead and New Harbor, and a floating battery to protect anchorage. The sites needed to accommodate barracks, magazines, arsenal, a commissariat store, and a shelter of Christian inhabitants.42 Pearl’s Hill would serve as a military fortification directed seaward and overlooking the western part of town, while Government Hill was the refuge for European residents.43 Europeans remained at roughly 2 percent of the population from the 1840s to the 1870s. Militarization was directed against a population of eighty thousand Chinese inhabitants and two large convict establishments. The convict jails were an additional concern and two hundred sepoys were posted, ready “to defend Government House, to repel an attack from Campong Glam [sic] to overawe the convict jail and take the ordinary jail and Government Office guards and others in the immediate neighborhood.”44 The fortification of Singapore catered to the introduction of European troops, their families, and native servants by providing superior living conditions. Two full companies of European artillery, one wing of European regiment, one full company of Golundauze45 and one entire regiment of Madras native artillery, who would be distinct from the local corps in the settlement, were anticipated.46 Native troops from Madras, who had not participated in the Indian mutiny of 1857, were preferred over Chinese and Malays as a corps or militia.47 They would replace convict guards and police. Singapore also needed to improve the quality of its armaments. Due to a flourishing trade in arms between various natives of the region, including an army of Achenese rebels, the groups instigating intestine commotions were well-armed. Captain Collyer declared that there was “a very large business done in this place in the sale of cannons, of which, there are hundreds of all calibers from 18 pounders to small corronades and muskets of all descriptions, exposed for sale.”48 In the debate on the hills, the numerous tensions between the nascent colony and its center of control in India became apparent. For British India the Straits Settlements was a peripheral colony, and its usefulness was framed exclusively by colonial maritime interests in the region. India was as always reluctant to spend money on developing the settlement. The fortification of Singapore and

the citadel

197

increases in its military quota came due to reservations regarding the use of Indian soldiers following the Indian mutiny. Local defenses on Forts Canning and Fullerton and Mts. Palmer and Faber needed to be increased, and New Harbor needed to be fortified for the location of important naval establishments. Sandy Point, Tanjong Katong, on the southeastern shoreline, was proposed as a base from which government steamboats would chase pirates. Town plans drawn during this period marked out the radial fire of heavy guns, gun sights, cannon trajectories, sweeps, plunges and relative positions of arsenal and magazines, trenches and redoubts, all quantified in terms of firing ranges. For example, a battery of guns from Government Hill was oriented toward Kampung Gelam, while a light parapet was proposed at a lower level so that the base of the hill and streets could be fired at.49 The town was reviewed from the new perspective of its elevated defenses, in military terms, and an imaginary map was constructed just above the face of the town following the path of musket fire. In Collyer’s estimate, the guns had complete command of the town, the river, the shore for some distance and [are] a powerful auxiliary in defense of the roadstead and from it I could demolish the town, or force my way to the sea or be relieved from that direction.50

Similarly, a [p]ermanent redoubt on Pearl’s Hill [would] defend the town from an attack from the new harbour side of the sepoy lines and the magazine, but its fire would cross the fire of the battery on Mt Sophia, on the north face of Government Hill, would fire directly in reverse of any attempt at an attack on the west side of it, and fires across the south end on angle of Government Hill over Hill Street. Pearl’s Hill now commands Government Hill by 10 feet and will be reduced to level.51

The project to defend Singapore—against itself—demanded alterations to both its physical geography and military establishment. Buildings already occupying the proposed sites were removed or relocated and new buildings were added to service the military establishment.52 Barracks, subaltern quarters, gun lascar and store, lascar lines, commissariat stores, canteens, officers’ quarters and houses, court martial room, orderly room, and garrison library were expanded to accommodate new arrivals.53 An infantry of gunners, sappers, and miners were appointed to man guns of different poundage and howitzers.54 New functions were demanded of existing structures. The Tan Tock Seng and the seamen’s hospitals adjacent to the cantonment were vacated and used as

198

hidden hands and divided landscapes

commissariat stores.55 Burial on the side of Government Hill was prohibited and houses that got in the way of the range of fire were purchased, wherever possible, and dismantled, while others were to be used as barricades.56 Slopes, marshes, ditches, and canals became strategic devices to delay attack, and relative distances between defenses were used to measure the entire landscape.57 The reports on the defenses outlined the radical shift to a quantitative analysis of the city in terms of vertical positions and areas covered, measured, as argued previously, by gun sights and ranges of fire. A very different understanding of the physical landscape thus emerged, mirrored perhaps in the demographic calculation of increases in native populations. Pearl’s Hill (1,000 yards long, 830 yards wide, and covering 172 acres) was the ideal site among these, commanding the cantonment, H.M. Prison, and Chinese settlement. The hill’s advantage was its elevation of 170 feet above sea level; it was one of the three highest points in the landscape. Pearl’s Hill was 4,000 feet from Government Hill, 3,300 feet northward from the beach, and flanked by New Bridge Road, Magazine Road, River Valley Road, two canals, and the Singapore River.58

Figure 27. Singapore defenses, showing range of fire directed inward (PRO MPG 1/821, UK: National Archives, Kew).

the citadel

199

The panoptic view from the hilltop defenses looked down on the grid plan but operated above and across its parameters. In rising above its own grid, the Straits government had acknowledged its failure to control and regulate the native population. Its firepower, trained on the town from all sides, intended instead to overawe the population into submission.59 Whereas during the Penang riots of 1867, the natives had climbed onto rooftops to escape the grid (see chapter 6), the government now used this same strategy to assert its military power. Despite the severity of the defensive landscape and the population against which it was directed, it proved impossible to maintain strict boundaries against the townspeople. A constant traffic of natives employed in servicing the defenses encroached on the land on the hill slopes and used facilities within the lines. The wells in the sepoy lines in particular, which provided a ready supply of water for washing and bathing, proved attractive to the neighborhood adjacent to the cantonment. The military authorities complained: Nuisances of every description are committed in the very lines under the officers houses and in like manner the townspeople resort to Pearls Hill for the same purpose much to the discomfort of the artillery, both European and native.60

Moreover, despite being partly provoked by the convict presence, the construction and maintenance of the defenses ironically involved their collaboration. Convict labor proved the “only hope of getting the works done thoroughly and at the same time at a comparatively small outlay.”61 This labor was also witnessing and likewise resisting the transformation of the penal environment.

The Prison The urban riots described in the previous chapter tell us of broader collective unrest but give little or no detail of prisoner disaffection. Were individual prisoners sensitive to changes in penal policy and urban administration? How was the defensive repositioning of the colonial government and the end of transportation received in the colonial prison? Such questions raise the issue of a different kind of resistance, dialectical in nature, which emerged during this period of change. Various authors have described direct retaliatory action by penal populations as an internal affair where particular grievances were aired, individually or collectively. While petitions would address specific and personal issues, riots were often provoked by authoritarian measures. Writing on the Middle East, Anthony Gorman describes bread and water riots at Tura against indeterminate sentences, protests against being incarcerated with particular types of criminals, protests

200

hidden hands and divided landscapes

against British occupation, hunger strikes, and mass breakouts.62 Anand Yang and David Arnold, writing on India, provide a litany of such incidents related to messing at the Chapra jail in Bihar in 1842, the Patna jail in 1845, and the Allahabad jail in 1846, describing how the prison became a battlefield over caste.63 Arnold cites everyday resistance through vandalism of machinery at a customary level as well as raids on the jail from the outside, as in Agra in 1846, when 192 prisoners were freed. Escapes and prison breaks undoubtedly fall within these same categories in a history of resistance to authority and evident politicization of prisoners. The Singapore prison saw few rebellions of a violent nature while it hosted Indian transportees. As described previously, prisoners were well aware of their rights and appeared to exercise them with the responsibility arising from an extraordinary degree of freedom. Certainly, there were attempted escapes and a few successes, largely from rural commands, but the lack of a rural Indian population into which they could be easily absorbed hampered the transportees’ opportunities to escape.64 McNair mentions two attempts on the lives of the penal superintendents.65 This was not the case for the rest of the penal population, who could be easily concealed within the immigrant body. Chinese and Malay prisoners who occupied the convict jail, once it was relieved of its Indian internees, found few avenues for escape. An organized breakout, when accompanied by violent acts and violent retaliation, reflected a radical change in the Straits penal environment. One such incident will serve as an example. The dissatisfaction of the local prisoners and their growing insurgency against penal reform became evident on 13 February 1875, when an escape was reported from the Singapore criminal prison at Bras Basah.66 At 5 p.m., as the prisoners were sitting down to their evening meal of rice, vegetables, and pork or fish, sixty of the lower- and middle-grade local Chinese prisoners struck down their warders and broke out from the central enclosure. [T]he first blow was struck by a prisoner near the center of the shed, who hit warder Sanford between the eyes with a hatchet, partly concealed by his sleeve. Then a number of men (all Chinese) rose and cried Pah! Pah! (strike, strike) and set upon the rest of the warders. The European warders who were poorly armed with umbrellas and walking sticks had little chance against such an onslaught and the prisoners escaped from the central enclosure, housing their dormitories and cook houses, towards the work yard, in the southernmost part of the prison.67

The gang now scaled the wall between the prison yard and work yard and forced its way through the main gate of this quarter.

the citadel

201

Some of the prisoners had armed themselves with kunda sticks used in carrying the buckets of food. Some had hatchets, chisels, iron bars and pointed rods—apparently brought away from the mechanics work yard, or obtained from the rattan work shed in the main yard. The pointed bars and rods are believed to have been prepared for the purpose; sledge hammers were also procured by breaking open the store room near the upper grade ward.68

The prisoners used ladders seized from the lumberyard to scale the prison walls and escape through the grounds of the adjacent church.69 In this way, the industrial tools that were advocated for labor reform enabled penal insurgence. Finding themselves outnumbered, the warders armed the European prisoners with rifles from the stand in the guardroom and ordered them to fire.70 The report on the outbreak of 1875 revealed growing insurgence within the walls of the Singapore prison. The riot was believed to have been in protest against a scheduled flogging of both an Indian and a Malay prisoner, to be held in the hollow square at its center.71 Six separate incidents over the previous year suggested that two Chinese gangs, allied with the notorious “Selangore pirates,” had plotted a chain of incidents to provoke the European warders.72 The warders attributed their belligerence to the system of association where prisoners ate, slept, and worked together. Moreover, the prisoners’ communications could not be censored because none of the warders spoke “Chinese.” Evidence that Chinese and Malays had joined ranks was equally troubling. Critical to the report was the observation that the prisoners had been armed, while the warders were not, resulting in injuries to sixteen warders.73 The attempted escape resulted in twenty-seven serious casualties, including the prison superintendent Digby Henry Dent.74 Its political context was the ongoing plan for the transformation of all jails according to the separate system. With the imminent cessation of transportation and the dwindling of new recruits from Indian prisons, the prison administration had begun to increase the divisions within the existing structures. At first this was achieved almost literally by dividing the open space with high walls and introducing shot drill sheds and work sheds for corrective labor. In the new rules set out after transportation in 1869, the decision was to have two types of prisons.75 The civil establishment was moved to Pearl’s Hill, where the existing civil jail was requisitioned for this purpose. Meanwhile, the criminal prison at Bras Basah was divided between a larger house of correction for criminal offenses and a smaller convict jail for local prisoners awaiting transportation.76 The adjustment in the scales of the relative institutions suggests that increasing numbers of local prisoners were being incarcerated. Additionally, prisoners serving more than six months in Penang and Melaka

202

hidden hands and divided landscapes

were brought up to Singapore, placing a total of seven hundred men in the criminal establishment.77 The remaining transportees were removed from the prison and housed in brick fields or cattle lines and finally in the native barracks, vacated after natives were replaced by European troops.78 What we witness in the early 1870s is the process by which one model of confinement that had originated as the house of correction began to consume all others in the Straits Settlements. Edmund du Cane’s system of “Hard Labour, Hard Fare and Hard Board,” was mirrored in the Straits and, accordingly, the amalgamation of the prisons took precedence.79 The sheriff’s jails in each of the settlements were the first points of entry into a system whereby, after sentencing, the prisoner was criminalized rather than corrected. This transformation was achieved by moving the house of correction back from its temporary facility at Balestier Road to its original site at Bras Basah and converting it into a criminal prison. Whereas previously, convicts transported from India far outnumbered the local penal population, these figures were now reversed. Changes to the penal system, accompanied by reviews of prison discipline in 1868, 1869, and 1872, proposed a system of separation for the better management of local prisoners.80 In the separate system, administrative changes included an increase in surveillance. The number of warders was increased from ten in the old establishment to seventy-two, comprising free warders, police peons, and fifty former transportees for day and night work.81 Segregation hardened into systems of isolation. The existing wards were divided up into cells for 168 prisoners, and an additional story was added to each.82 The refractory ward was pulled down to accommodate a ward of fifty-two cells and two new wards of one hundred cells were built in 1873. The total cost was $15,700.83 New offices, shot drill sheds, and punishment cells were added to the existing buildings, and the European, women’s, and boys’ wards and the work yard were all separated from the rest of the prison. The sixteen punishment cells were given individual airing yards to ensure the inmates’ complete isolation. In total, 320 blacksmiths, 320 coolies, and 240 carpenters were engaged in building works, with the blacksmiths increasing the numbers of iron bars throughout the prison.84 The Straits government’s penal rhetoric of “reform through labor” was replaced by a desire to regulate punishment. The commission that investigated the prison in the 1860s had felt that “attempts to economize by industrial employment [was] at the sacrifice of effective punishment.”85 These opinions were reiterated. As a first step, a centralized cook house located outside the prison replaced the multiple cook houses that had served the Indian convicts.86 By doing so, the prison diet, described as “hard fare,” was used to graduate punishment and homogenize the inmate population.87 For the first ten days in each month of imprisonment every short-sentence prisoner was given a diet of rice and salt

the citadel

203

(bread for Europeans). Long-sentence prisoners had to endure this same diet for the first six months of imprisonment.88 The penal diet was introduced due to the opinion that “the low animal natures of too many of the criminal class, and the admitted efficacy of the reduction of food in cases of prison offence, render plain the value of food as a form of penal correction.”89 In fact, such alterations were most detrimental to the well-being of European prisoners who had been advantaged by the previous system of messing.90 Labor in the new system was likewise divided into rigorous penal labor, industrial hard labor, and industrial light labor, of which the first two types were conducted in silence.91 Both categories of labor were graduated in six monthly intervals, so that misconduct could be punished with demotion. Shot drill, which involved drilling heavy shot, was introduced for one hour at a time twice a day for all short-sentence prisoners and for the first six months of sentence for all long-sentence prisoners. The superintendent assessed the good conduct of each prisoner according to a mark system and promoted him accordingly through different forms of labor.92 In the case of women, although the same criteria applied, their number was too small to warrant new regulation.93 Penal officers of the old guard in Singapore, although keen on better punishment, opposed the introduction of the mark system and unproductive labor.94 It was argued that tasks like shot drill and treadmills, which had been introduced in Britain to prevent competition with free labor, did not apply to the colonies, where labor was scarce and expensive and there were many public works to be undertaken.95 As to the success of the separate system, officials observed that principles, which in theory and practice may apply to criminals in Europe or America, could not be expected to have the same effect on “semi civilized races.”96 In the case of Chinese, Indians, Malays, and natives of the archipelago, who were identified in that latter category, education had to precede cellular separation. In short, a course of instruction was necessary to truly feel the disgrace of punishment and to experience the shame and discredit associated with it. The eager reception of transportees by relatives, the great demand for convict women as wives, and the famous notoriety of political prisoners suggested to British officials that due to their lack of education and civilization, Indian natives did not understand penal disgrace.97 Guilt, shame, and remorse, the counterparts of proper citizenship, were to be introduced to the settlement colonies with the new penal system. The colonial jail in Singapore was to go through one more iteration before the turn of the century, which completed its cycle of involution. The Bras Basah prison site would be abandoned altogether. As structures accumulated and physical divisions increased to accommodate the requirements of the separate system, sanitation and ventilation in the prison were affected. In 1878 and 1879 the

204

hidden hands and divided landscapes

dreaded beriberi from Ceylon spread rapidly among prisoners and was believed to be due to unhealthy living conditions.98 Ironically, beriberi was a “dietary deficiency disease” that may well have been caused by “hard fare.” Nevertheless, the penal diet, which was graduated by amount and type of labor performed, was reviewed in 1873 and 1885 with increasing severity.99 The amount of nitrogen required for a man to work was calculated and rice was replaced with wheat flour chapattis. Following the second outbreak of beriberi, the government deemed it advisable to relocate the entire penal establishment to an elevated site far from the town center. Increasingly, the “health of prisoners” became a measure of reform and rehabilitation in the Indian penal system, writes Arnold, and reform through labor lost its significance.100 Health was a necessary concern, since 40,550 prisoners had died in the jails of Bengal between 1843 and 1867.101 The prison in India was a laboratory for investigating and controlling diseases affecting the population at large. Prison officials were drawn from the Indian medical service, and experiments in vaccinations, clinical studies, and various medical advances found compliant and ignorant subjects from among the penal population. The Indian jail conference in 1877 was a medical affair, one among a surfeit of similar committees and conferences in 1864, 1877, 1889, 1892, and 1919–1920.102 Reports, commissions, and an attendant increase in various forms of governmentality, with an equivalent hardening of prejudices and racial stereotypes, would result. “The prison exemplified the role of colonial medicine as an agency for discipline and control,” writes Arnold, and the “statistical, sanitary and medical reconnaissance of society, via the prison, of biological traits relevant to wider ‘economic management’ was reminiscent of similar processes in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe.”103 In the Straits system, with the penal diet being applied to the entire penal population, the consequences were similarly far-reaching.104 The diet proved to be a direct conduit for controlling the health and measuring the tolerance levels of the penal population, and the prison outbreak of 1875 was attributed partly to the resultant discontent. The committee appointed to inquire into the outbreak recommended a new cellular facility. Although the prison in Singapore never achieved its utopian form of a panoptic, radial plan, as in European examples, the government aspired to achieve cellular division. Its resistance to adopting the panoptic model was largely due to the desire for asymmetric treatment of the penal population. The criminals, although homogenized by dietary and labor regimes, individuated by crime, and segregated in cells, continued to be identified by race, albeit outside the system of association. Radial prisons were not essential because surveillance was directed at the citizenry rather than at prisoners, and indeed

the citadel

205

criminals, many of them recidivists, were being created exclusively out of their number. The prison we encounter at the end of the nineteenth century in Singapore was an improvement in terms of its modern structure and facilities, but was regressive at many other levels. Punishment and the means of enforcing it upon a population that was essentialized by race and by class appeared to be its primary focus. Prison officers were fully convinced that Asians were incapable of reform except through punitive forms of labor, a troubling end to more than five decades of liberal experiments. Health and the control of diseases, a preoccupation of the Indian system, became a new concern with rapid increases in the numbers confined. In fact, the Straits Settlements, which once led penal reform in appointing “prisoners as their own warders,” appeared to be following the course of the Indian penal model. Indeed, as the number of local prisoners exceeded that of transportees, the prison in Singapore converted to an institution similar to that which had evolved in India and Ceylon. The criminal prison was the house of correction magnified and modified with a penal policy designed for immigrant laborers. At the core of its multiple shifts away from public works to limited intramural manufacturing and increasing attention to health regimens was the conviction that recidivism was a psychological sickness and criminality a disease. The 1872 prison commission individuated and criminalized citizens along these lines for the first time. Paradoxically, argues Brown, when compared with other British colonies, it was the Burmese prison that produced radical changes in the early twentieth century.105 In measures that appear curiously retrogressive, reform through labor was prescribed by Alexander Paterson in 1925, quite deliberately as a measure for rehabilitation and reducing the numbers confined. Burma at the turn of the century had one of the highest rates of prisoners per head of population.106 What is interesting about the Burmese case is that reformative labor was reintroduced long after it had been abandoned in the Straits and in India. Other reforms proposed by Paterson, such as the abolishing of Indian warders to eliminate racial differences within the hierarchy, the reduction of carceral sentences to two years, and even a recommendation of transportation for sentences beyond that duration, gave an unusual twist to prison reform. Paterson proposed that after two years in confinement prisoners should be permitted to live on worksites with families in temporary shelters much like they did in the Straits before 1860. However, the most important change was the conviction among penal officials that Burmese criminals could be rehabilitated and that labor was the means of achieving it, policies that were scorned by Singapore’s penal establishment.107 Whereas Burmese prison officials were willing to confront the possibility that incarceration may not be reformative, the commission on the Singapore prison

206

hidden hands and divided landscapes

was unshaken in its resolve. Singapore’s new criminal jail on Pearl’s Hill would be the most severely carceral model to be introduced to the Settlements so far. The site chosen for the new prison on Pearl’s Hill, was adjacent to the civil jail, which had retained its 1840s enclosure. This older structure acted as the core of a vast complex combining all three categories of prisons. McNair designed the facility following the latest British models, and the Pearl’s Hill jail was completed in 1882.108 At its center was the civil jail, which retained its original function but was surrounded by new buildings, including industrial workshops, European and native wards, female criminal and civil prisons, native and European hospitals, warders’ and superintendent’s quarters, laundry, kitchen, store, and photography department.109 Although the kitchen was largely centralized, in keeping with the new penal diet, each separate penal category had discrete bathhouses with the recently introduced water closets. It was as if the several prisons on the settlement had finally congregated in their separate cellular forms around their progenitor. Whereas in that first prison, forty years previously, separation could be read in the several work yards spilling out from a single prison building, those very spaces appeared to have been transformed into compact cellular constructions. The interethnic alliances that were possible throughout the 1860s would no longer be nurtured within this new penal environment. The criminals that fed the jails from the 1870s onward were not Indian transportees but immigrant laborers.110 Their cellular separation was indicative of the means by which secularization would eventually divide the ethnic communities outside the prison. This change was reflected in the appointment of superintendents. Digby Henry Dent was followed by Major W. R. Grey (1875) and Mr. (later Sir) E. M. Merewether (1893), after which the post was always held by a member of the Civil Service.111 The contradictory marriage of a plural polity with a model for unitary citizenship was thus first achieved in the Straits penal system in the gathering of various penal facilities into a universal model. The house of correction, lately christened the criminal prison, rose on Pearl’s Hill as an inflexible symbol of colonial law, overlooking an unruly settlement. Meanwhile, the apotheosis of this new form of subjectivity and the symbol of autonomous government was being constructed in a new location on yet another hillock at the heart of the European town.

The Government House The introduction of the separate system was a consequence of the political separation of the Straits Settlements from India and its new status as a crown colony. Individuated thus, the capital, Singapore, became the primary site for public institutions. Separation on 1 April 1867 was closely followed by plans for

Figure 28. Criminal prison, Pearl’s Hill, Singapore, 1881 (PRO CO 700/SS, National Archives, Kew [redrawn by author]).

208

hidden hands and divided landscapes

a new Government House of a suitable scale and grandeur for the new governor, Colonel Sir Harry St. George Ord.112 The original Government House on Government Hill was under reconstruction when the mutiny of 1857 halted all civil works. The site was taken over by the new defenses for what was later named Fort Canning, and a house was rented in town for the governor.113 Ord, dissatisfied with this arrangement, proposed that a new residence be built in haste, in readiness to receive the Duke of Edinburgh on his visit to the settlement in 1869. Work commenced just three months after Ord’s arrival in the settlement.114 McNair was appointed to the project and

Figure 29. The cellular ward for Europeans in the Pearl’s Hill prison, Singapore (PRO MPGG 1/17.2, UK: National Archives, Kew).

the citadel

209

originally proposed a small bungalow for $100,000, but both the council and public rejected this proposal, as well as a subsequent sketch by him, in favor of a more imposing structure.115 The site for Government House, of 104 acres, one road, and two perches of land, was purchased from Mssrs. Martin Dyce and Co. in July 1867 for $42,000.116 A further two acres of land was purchased by public auction in August 1867 for a further $300. Public money was spent on both land purchase and building construction.117 The new Government House sat atop Prinsep’s Hill, adjacent to the new landed houses and mansions that had opened up at the rear of the European settlement, and offered a panoptic view of the townscape and harbor.118 The European-owned properties in the Orchard and Tanglin area of the town were country bungalows of a scale in keeping with the rising prosperity of the settlers. The Government House was meant to be on display not only to the colony, but also to the world at large, which it now approached as the head of an independent territory, free port, and administration. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 increased the colony’s affluence, for Singapore became a major transaction point for the east-west trade and a coaling station for steamers.119 Government House was built on a plateau, which was achieved by leveling the top of the hill by five feet, and was approached along a winding driveway through spacious gardens.120 It was set within a cluster of auxiliary service buildings, including servants’ quarters and stables, that were linked by walkways to the main structure. Convicts laid out the garden in the picturesque manner typical of colonial mansions of the period. The work on the building involved an initial outlay covering road works connecting the site to Orchard Road, the construction of a mortar mill, and the leveling of the hilly site prior to commencing building work.121 Convicts produced building materials by quarrying stone, felling timber, and preparing lime and cement. They laid out drains and pipes to connect the site to the town water works. Only then was it possible to commence building work. The design for Government House replicated Palladio’s Villa Emo that had been first used for the Raffles institution by G. D. Coleman.122 Described as “Ionic upon Doric,” it was a clear departure from the pragmatic military style that had been applied by McNair during his tenure as colonial engineer. The building was raised four feet from the plateau with ample room for ventilation. The bricks came from the brick kilns nearby including special bricks for molding, copings, architraves, and capitals. Each bricklayer laid five to six hundred bricks per day.123 The plaster for the external walls was composed of a mixture of two parts portland cement and one part white selected sand and granite, which was powdered to dust in small handmills or querns “carefully and slowly mixed by convicts.”124 Extensive ornamentation and decoration demanded considerable

210

hidden hands and divided landscapes

skill of the convict labor employed in the construction of the building. The work was closely supervised by McNair, who lived in a small bungalow near the site and used it as a workshop for pillar heads and stucco compositions.125 The grandeur of government is evident in the elaborate plan of Government House when compared with any other building on the settlement. The ground floor consisted of, on its south side, a dining room (50’ x 28’) and a billiard room (40’ x 28’), which when combined formed a banqueting hall, and on its north side a ballroom in the form of a T (lower limb 50’ x 28’, upper limb 40’ x 28’) with a recessed orchestra.126 The center was a hall (32’ x 45’) flanked by the staircase, and the rear accommodated sleeping apartments for guests and strangers, baths, and offices for clerks. On the south end of the upper floor there were two drawing rooms (40’ x 28’ and 30’ x 28’) opening into a library (28’ x 20’). The north side was used for the governor’s private apartments comprising a large bedroom (40’ x 28’) with a ladies dressing room screened off within it and a gentleman’s dressing room adjoining it. There was also a room for the governor’s office, library, and waiting room. A third story was raised over the central hall forming a tower accessed by a light spiral staircase. This section of the building had a slate roof. The lower floors and verandah were paved in marble.127 Although the spaces within Government House imitated the Victorian mansions of Britain, it was clearly an Anglo-Indian building. Current colonial discourses on health and sanitation provoked an exaggerated response to climate. The raising of the floor a few feet above the ground so that air could pass under the house was a feature of Straits architecture, typically found in Malay kampung houses. A verandah twelve feet deep, with five feet of serried louver boarding hanging down from the level of the pillar capitals, surrounded the building. In addition, there were rattan blinds to protect against sun and rain. The verandah connecting the front to the rear block was widened to secure a free circulation of air, and the building faced the sea to invite all prevailing winds.128 Verandahs, porticos, and conservatories wrapped around the building envelope. Over the porte cochere (thirty-two feet wide) was an elevated portico with marble flooring. Two arcaded conservatories were added, one to the rear of the drawing room and the other to the governor’s apartments. The porosity and lightness desired in designing for humidity was anchored by the building’s main feature, the grand staircase that held the separate wings together. The following description by the colonial engineer captures the impact that the choreographed grandeur of the staircase may have had on visiting dignitaries. The house is built somewhat in the shape of a cross. Ascending a flight of broad steps from the wide portico, you enter a spacious entrance hall floored with beautiful white marble from Java, having in your direct front a handsome

the citadel

211

stone staircase leading up through an arcade to a half-pace, from which it returns right and left to the lobby above, which is of the same dimensions of the entrance hall.129

The expense incurred in supporting the grand image of the Government House is evident in the following list of furnishings for the walnut-paneled end drawing room.130 Imported from London for the sum of £652-10-4 (British pounds-shillings-pence) the list included, 2 large silvered plates of glass from ceiling to ground at end of drawing room 14 ft high on panelled blind panes and outer moulded frames richly gilt, 2 carved and gilt console tables for drawing room and marble slabs on top, 2 large stuffed sofas of best materials in fine canvas and pillows for do, 4 easy chairs caned with cushion seats, 2 small ottomans or conversation chairs instead of large ottoman, 2 stuffed easy chairs of best material on turned legs, and custom finished in fine canvas, 6 light chairs with stuffed cushion seats, 2 occassional or writing tables for before sofa, 2 card tables. Stuffed furniture trimmed with 2 large sofas pillows, 2 small ottomans , 4 easy chairs cushions, 2 full stuffed easy chairs, 6 single chairs, 37 yards wide silk cord, (and) 1 dozens buttons, padding, tassels.131

While the comfort and opulence of the interior is evident in the above list, the number of different types of chairs alerts us to the different classes of visitors entertained by the governor. We can picture the governor in any one of these seating arrangements addressing his equals and immediate subordinates, such as British officials and merchants or those wealthy natives educated into European etiquette. The verandah and the portico were doubtless reserved for lesser classes of natives who, due to race and class-based distinctions, were prohibited from bringing their concerns into the marble interior. His host of (Chinese and Bengali) servants were the only natives to penetrate the governor’s private apartments. Convicts were employed as syces and gardeners.132 Throughout Ord’s tenure in government, he was criticized for what was said to be lavish expenditures. A letter to the editor of the Star in 1869 declared: [T]o build a suitable government residence is admitted to be a proper public object, but to raise a palace utterly unsuitable to the real position of its future occupants is but to gratify a personal whim out of the public funds and to entail on them a permanent burden.133

As the building expanded and exceeded its initial budget, both the house and the governor were criticized harshly by irate residents. In his own defense, the colo-

212

hidden hands and divided landscapes

nial engineer argued that the budget had been calculated on his original sketch, and due to understaffing he had been unable to revise it for the new proposals. He defended the increases, saying the Duke of Edinburgh’s visit “had brought on an additional outlay for adjuncts such as stables, kitchen, servants quarters, gas fittings, and bell hangings.”134 In 1869 an additional $40,000 was requisitioned as well as another $3,000 for a guardhouse that had been overlooked in the estimate. An article in the Overland Straits Observer accused the engineer of using convict labor to excuse the excess of expenditure. It pointed out that “labor has been excluded from [the] estimate and put down as revenue” and that “convict labor belongs to the colony and cannot be disposed of by the executive without vote [no more] than any other revenue.”135 The article suggested that sun blinds had been put down under “jail manufactures,” the avenue leading to the house under “roads streets and bridges,” and cartage, gas pipes, and lighting under “repairs to civil buildings,” thus removing these items from the Government House budget. The article concluded, “[T]hose heads which fall under the colonial Engineers office are not audited and so you may judge what a field they afford for supplementing the expenditure deemed necessary to maintain the governor’s dignity.” The Observer took the three classes of convicts employed by the government, in gangs, quarries, and kilns, as well as on site, into account and calculated the drain on labor in the sister settlements. It estimated that during the twenty-eight months of work on Government House, the total spent amounted to $220,000, although the Straits government claimed it was $174,282.14.136 Additionally, free labor was employed from Johor to accelerate the completion of floor and ceiling work. The Observer proposed an inquiry into the expenditure on the project.137 Meanwhile, the Straits Association was set up in London to protect the interests of the European merchants from the activities of the government.138 It was observed in retrospect that at that time, A home with so much staircase and so little room for its appearance was not perhaps appreciated by the public as it deserved. Sir Harry Ord led the Colonial Engineer a pretty dance over the whole construction of it, and those who consider it has any deficiencies such as the want of a front door to close the building, need not necessarily lay it all upon the architect’s shoulder.139

The completion of Government House in October 1869 brought to a close a period in history that had been initiated with the construction of its predecessor, the first Government House, by G. D. Coleman. Whereas the first Government House had ushered in modern and democratic urban forms to the settlements,

the citadel

213

the same aesthetic was now accompanied by fortification and incarceration. It seemed to be retrogressive, a return to the state house, fort, and dungeon, typical of Portuguese and Dutch colonization. In combination, the defenses, the new prison, and the Government House successfully replicated strategies of radial surveillance, cellular segregation, and the panoptic authority embodied in the European penal system. These were also the last large-scale building projects undertaken by transportees. From then on convict labor, although used in public works, would be used in a limited capacity and under strict supervision. The history of its investment in the public landscape would be omitted in subsequent accounts that sought to project colonial government as benign and enlightened. For the three convict draftsmen in the executive engineer’s office who executed the drawings for Government House along with other public and military works in the colony, the palace for the governor proved a monumental accomplishment. The principal draftsperson was Bawajee Rajaram, mentioned previously in the context of St. Andrew’s Cathedral. Although the use of forced labor for the colony’s primary institution contradicted the principles of secular liberalism,

Figure 30. Government House, Singapore, approaching completion (McNair, PTOW, plate xviii, facing p. 102).

214

hidden hands and divided landscapes

this paradox appeared not to trouble the Straits government. Ironically, the Government House appears on the $10,000 note, in circulation in Singapore during 2002–2003, reminding us of its colossal expense for the new colony.140 Still extant, as Istana (the house of Singapore’s president), Government House is a symbol of authority, whereas its political equivalent, the parliament building, carries the burden of government. It is open to the public on specific public holidays when citizens and tourists alike queue up to walk about the grounds and ground floor rooms. On the landing of the grand staircase, which undoubtedly dominates the entry, is a wooden statue of a guardian figure, one and a half feet high, that was found on the premises. Rescued and reinstated by President Ong Teng Cheong during the late 1990s, this statue is believed to be “the guardian of the house,” a bearded Indian man carrying a pot in his hands. The Indian features had in fact been concealed under a coat of paint that had converted the figure into a clean-shaven Malay “Mandore” or overseer.141 The effacing of one identity with another unwittingly prefigures the absorption of the Chulias into the Malay category, thus mimicking the essentializing strategies of the plural model. Not only does the secularization of a religious dvarapala (door keeper) for a colonial enterprise suggest the modern processes confronting traditional labor, but the figure, the only extant material artifact—barring buildings and building materials—that can be attributed to convicts, underwrites the history of Singapore’s premier institution and bestows blessings upon it.

Subjectivity and Citizenship The increasing defensiveness of the colonial government helped constitute the terms of subjectivity that were deemed desirable for autonomous government under the new Straits authority. The separation of the European population by the construction of the defenses emphasized its privilege and precipitated its gradual withdrawal inland and away from the original European town. European residents occupied bungalows closer to their plantations, away from the increasingly cramped urban quarters and potential sites of urban disturbances.142 The new Government House presided over this inland territory from its new location on the northwestern side of the settlement. The relationship of Europeans to the migrant population shifted accordingly, and toward the latter half of the nineteenth century these changes provoked the gradual encroachment of the central plain by the native population. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the Chinese town eventually straddled the river with the addition of Sae Por, which was located proximate to the Malay population.143 As the numbers of immigrants increased, a third and distinct social group could be identified within the local population. Between 1866 and 1869 a total

the citadel

215

of 21,773 Indians had migrated to the Straits as indentured laborers, of which 1,890 were women and 4,009 were minors.144 In Singapore, incoming migrants swelled Serangoon, the northern part of the city adjacent to the race course, creating a distinctly Indian quarter with a Hindu majority. Their trades included animal husbandry, dairy, and commerce, and they embraced the urban lifestyle of the Straits Settlements. Their compatriots on the plantations in Malaya fared far worse in comparison. In combination the Indian community, apart from a small number of traders and policemen, constituted the lowest rung of the colonial economy and swelled the numbers of the laboring population.145 Increasing immigrant numbers and their concentration in Serangoon produced an Indian plural category that was culturally distinct from Malays and Chinese. The prison on Pearl’s Hill, described in this chapter, was not the final model in a genealogy of colonial prisons. Rather, it was the last penal model that was framed within the history of penal transportation. Changi prison, which had cellular accommodation for six hundred prisoners, including twenty-four Europeans, replaced it in 1936.146 The transformation of the prison from the penal complex to the cellular jail would require two steps, first the categorization of natives into ethnic groups, and second their separation to prevent association. The final colonial prison was construed in opposition to the idea of association. This two-stage penal policy would underwrite the history of the plural system and produce the model for secular and individual citizenship. In 1942, with the Japanese occupation of Singapore, the Changi area was turned into a prisoner of war camp for Europeans (including Australian, American, and other prisoners of war) and the jail was used to house more than three thousand European men and four hundred women and children.147

Conclusion By the end of the presidency years it became evident that the urban spatial template introduced in Singapore had failed to achieve its objective of governance. What it provoked instead was a powerful and alternative conception of urban life and geographic belonging by immigrant communities. The colonial prison discussed in this history was a productive site in direct contrast with its European equivalents. Punishment, confinement, and reform were not prioritized and penal policy was repeatedly compromised by the imperatives of a capitalist economy, namely labor, property, land ownership, and a form of graduated citizenship that would extend the life and prosperity of a colonial settlement. Although deviant practices were denigrated in colonial rhetoric, they proved advantageous to both government and prisoners and produced various modern social relationships that did not conform to a common social will or vision. The

216

hidden hands and divided landscapes

city that was imagined by immigrants and transportees did not correspond to colonial urban norms, but assisted in their dissolution. Meanwhile, alternative urban expressions were produced dialogically through independent narratives of contestation, cohabitation, and belonging. In comparison with its newfound authority, the Straits government in the early years of transportation had produced a dynamic modern subjectivity by which prisoners were offered mobility and incentives to accumulate property or participate in the larger economic culture. Whereas plantation labor in the rural outskirts remained on the periphery of city-zenship, were locked into traditional labor practices, and confined in plantations, the prisoners had been central to constructions of urban subjectivity. They were intimately involved in city life and garnered some of the benefits of the medieval promise of city space as safeguarding particular personal freedoms. The conspicuity of the marginalized labor force had reinforced the model of graduated entitlements for the colonized population, but it had also blurred its boundaries. Within the native populations it provoked a reciprocal education into citizenship through legitimate and illegitimate practices. Despite coercion, colonial subjectivity was also realized through the extreme individuation experienced in captivity within an alien society and by the weight of individual punishment. Individuation, penalty, mobility, and industrial education conferred a dynamic modern subjectivity on prisoners, who proved pliant but not always compliant. The growing constraints imposed on the penal subject, and by reflection on the colonial citizen, are most evident during the period of autonomous government following 1867. As a crown colony and the seat of government, Singapore would emerge as a bureaucratic leviathan supported by its military and regulated through a cellular prison system. The colony’s subjects were likewise caught in the constraining grid of citizenship that had passed from collective identification as immigrant communities to individualization via processes of naturalization. The transformation of the Straits from laissez-faire government to a centralized authority had coincided exactly with the duration of its contentious penal history and the construction of its landscape around and through its penal system. Thereafter, Singapore’s declaration of autonomy from India was manifested through less obvious and more pervasive forms of confinement. New measures that were both spatial and regulatory silenced the interplay of multiple voices and divided the citizenry along the lines of a nascent plural political model.

C HAPTE R 8

Conclusion

Although contemporary Singapore has often been represented as a punitive city because of its pervasive apparatus of surveillance, the policing of political opposition, and continued use of corporal punishment and the death penalty, the postcolonial micromanagement of society by the government is not the concern of this book.1 It would be difficult to link a nineteenth-century penal system to its twentieth-century counterpart considering the subsequent impact of nationalism, communism, and the Japanese occupation on Singapore’s twentieth-century political history. However, the ominous vacuum presented by the Bras Basah Park for many decades suggests a different kind of question regarding the resilience of nineteenth-century colonial systems and processes in contemporary Singapore. If the Singapore prison was indeed the largest and most dominant institutional complex in the city for a considerable part of the colony’s modern history, how did it shape society at large? As described in the preceding chapters, the prison’s impact was evidently far broader than its evolving institutional template, which was imbricated with urban development and labor practices. The prison produced a graduated labor system, the resilience of which is apparent in the contemporary construction industry. These key issues refer back to the “Hidden Hands” of the title and its relevance to a broader understanding of the built environment in terms of spatial and cultural divisions as well as divided material and spatial practices. While working as an architect in Singapore during the late 1990s, I was troubled by a nagging question: Why were Singaporeans so accepting of foreign guest workers, whereas countries like Australia, with a comparable colonial and convict past, agitated against them? Particular histories of race prejudice appeared to shape both these responses. At that time (and even today) Singapore’s construction sites were often manned by South Asian “foreign workers,” who constituted an urban working class with severely limited rights.2 This question 217

218

hidden hands and divided landscapes

led to a historical investigation of racially differentiated labor practices in the region, which in turn raised the issue of immigration or assimilation as a historical response. Although debt slavery and racially distinct labor gangs had existed in indigenous kingdoms in Southeast Asia, the colonial period had introduced a different version of this practice by using transported prisoners.3 These observations led to the critical question regarding colonial citizenship and its relationship to the penal system, which underpins the structure of this book. Collectively, the urban and penal histories of colonial Singapore describe the experimental process through which plural subjectivity was formed in the colonial Straits Settlements. The plural racial categories that were maintained by the government through census and economic divisions intersected with the overlapping systems of self-regulation that were experimented with through the prison and the political structure. They in turn were constantly undermined by deviant strategies, subscribed to by both the colonial and the colonized. More importantly, the notion of plurality, of the segregation of colonial subjects within a physical template, changed over a fifty-year period from a structure containing race to a system for graduating the relationship between the colonial government and various categories of subjects. The most significant differentiation, in fact, was between native settler communities and others. This shift was made patently obvious in colonial penal experiments. The colonial city we are confronted with at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century did not conform to the conceptual model of a plural landscape, but had evolved into something quite different. In Malaysia, according to Khoo, the urban environment can be pictured as a concentric circle with the Chinese densely located in the center of the urban circle, a mixture of Chinese, Indians, and Malays surrounding the inner core, and a predominantly Malay population on the outer ring.4 Across the peninsula, he argues, there was geographical separation along ethnic lines on a broad scale, but on a smaller scale there was physical separation in urban areas. Almost every major town had distinctive ethnic areas, exclusive social organizations, and religious institutions. Occupational specialization along ethnic lines was evident. However, he observes that exclusive ethnic blocs did not exist and each ethnic group was heterogeneous, with marriages between groups contributing to forms of assimilation.5 In Singapore, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Malay community had been stripped of authority, marginalized but also augmented by immigrants from various parts of the archipelago as well as Muslim Indians. New Chinese immigrants had created Sae Por, a new town between Kampung Gelam and the European town, encroaching on the central plain and blurring the colonial division of Chinese and Malay communities. The Indians, whose spatial maneuvers can be traced all over the colonial map, had likewise moved

conclusion

219

across the city from Tanjong Pagar and Kreta Ayer, south of the river, and Bras Basah and Dhobi Ghaut in the European town to Seranggong, or Serangoon, an enclave that would become synonymous with Indian identity in the twentieth century. Indian Muslims and Peranakan Indian immigrants dwelling on the fringes of Kampung Gelam (Kampung Glam) and in areas nearby complicate this history.6 So why do we continue to perceive Singapore as a physical embodiment of a plural political template? The hardening of colonial policy around ethnicity, increasing immigration, and the physical segregation of ethnic communities in enclave societies have been cited repeatedly as the reasons for the persistence of the plural model. In fact, great pains have been taken to distinguish between the Malay kampung house and the Chinese shophouse despite the proliferation of shophouses in all three designated ethnic districts by the end of the nineteenth century. Architectural discussions of the colonial bungalow, the Malay house, and the Chinese shophouse likewise claim material presence for the plural cultural categories that are engaged in the political contest for Singapore (the Indian minority is consequently marginalized). The naming of the plural spaces of Singapore as Civic Centre, Chinatown, Little India, and Kampung Glam—in short, their separation according to culture despite multiple associations with government, immigrant groups, and those of regional nativity—suggests the postcolonial self-imposition of colonial naming practices. The Peranakan and Eurasian communities are relegated to the edge of the urban grid in the eastern part of the city where their mixed ethnicity cannot confuse the plural cultural categories. Is Singapore’s plural landscape a postcolonial fiction, perpetuated through political structures and heritage conservation strategies that are organized along ethnic lines? Joel Kahn’s recent discussion of the creation of a Malay kampung as the embodiment of colonial prejudices, proto-nationalist discourse, and everyday practice in colonial Singapore raises this question.7 The nationalist appropriation of colonial plural categories may in fact have altered their meanings and identities significantly in the desire to buttress specific claims on postcolonial entitlements. Is it possible that ethnicity has been structured, enforced, and reproduced to such a degree during the course of the twentieth century that it suppresses other forms of plurality prevalent in the built landscape, for example, the operation of class across these categories? A racially differentiated, plural polity is in fact maintained within the unified framework of a liberal and democratic (in some respects) economy. By framing the state apparatus in anglophile cultural and legal systems and a Western institutional framework, Singapore imposed an economically determined common social will on its diverse polity. However, the incongruity of this union shapes critical

220

hidden hands and divided landscapes

yet marginal spatial practices in the contemporary city of Singapore, which are outlined briefly in these concluding pages.

Some Postcolonial Observations on Singapore As described in the introduction, Singapore has a plural society, which is officially described as multiracial and is divided into four ethnic categories: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and “Other.” As argued so far, this model was first tested in the divisions of the colonial prison system. In the colonial Straits Settlements, although “race” initially superseded “class” as a means of organizing labor and citizenship, these categories were being constantly adjusted to suit an ambivalent penal policy. The dissolution of the penal model was likewise reflected in the dissolution of its built form and of its physical context, the colonial city, and in the failure of the plural boundaries of the colonial urban plan. The definition of plurality that emerged from colonial urban and penal experiments was not that of a divided landscape but of a polyglot environment where the continuous desire to make immigrants into citizens and workers produced a very different model of plurality. By forcibly restructuring the population into racial compartments, both the late colonial government and the early nationalist state applied a coercive model of governance that in many instances contradicted the social and cultural reality. In short, the private and public spheres were inverted in the postindependence polity. In revisiting the plural model it is useful to return to the observations of Nagata, particularly in relation to pluralism and stratification. Quoting Enloe, she observes that “[i]n a poly-ethnic society where modernization is creating a growing number of new status indices upon which the interests of all groups are beginning to converge, ethnic boundaries (as expressions of ethnic status) can still be maintained, at the expense, it seems, of class consciousness.”8 Cultural and economic definitions of plurality, when prized apart by internal economic differentiation and the existence of occupational and functional strata across ethnic lines, undoubtedly introduce systems of stratification external to those institutionalized and contained within the separate cultural categories—that is, those determined by patronage and ranking.9 The continued conflation of these categories in Singapore and Malaysia can be attributed to several factors. First, European economic policy was culturally inscribed, and by monopolizing colonial politics, culture, and society, Europeans practiced specific forms of ethnocentrism as endemic to colonial state formation.10 In short, Europeans, despite “liberal” economic policies, tended to monopolize both the public and private spheres, admitting only those who assimilated into their culture and value system. Second, with independence,

conclusion

221

political power was conferred on the ethnic majority, creating friction between them and numerical minorities (who had combined with them in the anticolonial cause). The resultant displacement of the Malay minority, which harbored a strong sense of geographic entitlement, was naturally problematic. As cultural cleavages were reinforced through economic competition tied to political privilege, race riots broke out in both Malaysia and Singapore during the 1960s, provoking the structural enforcement of colonial plural categories as a form of affirmative action. Domesticated ethnic categories now confronted each other in political space as the public and private spheres coalesced and were pried apart. Because this process was artificial and needed an equivalent expansion of governmental structures to sustain it, nationalist policy was conceived along ethnic lines. If, however, the plural model operating in Singapore is a political one inherited from a colonial pattern of cultural pluralism, then what actually happens in the marketplace? Indeed, how does contemporary Singapore’s plural society operate on the ground? In contemporary Singapore, economic subjectivity is stratified into three groups: transnational elite (expatriates), Singaporean citizens, and transient workers (from regional and less affluent neighbors), which reproduces the plural categories that emerged from penal experiments. An intelligentsia modeled on transnational elites and produced through preferential education experiments inserts a further class differentiation into Singaporean identity. These stratums intersected with racial categories for many decades after independence, inasmuch as race can be conflated with class. However, a change to its cultural imprint is evident in recent years. The treatment of these different subject groups reflects their different relationships to global capital wherein the transnational elite have the greatest advantages while the transient workers remain the most vulnerable group. This unequal distribution of entitlements in former colonies has been described as an “internal colonialism,” whereby racial and cultural hierarchies are maintained within the class distinctions of nation after independence.11 In the postcolonial context these hierarchies continue to be maintained due to the unequal rates of exchange between the metropolitan center and the peripheral ethnic hinterland, while the ethnic division of labor replicates the exploitive relationships established during colonialism. When applied to the former colonies, “internal colonialism” describes the exploitation of minority ethnic communities by a powerful urban elite who establish cultural and citizenship norms.12 Increasingly, self-reflexive, analytical, or critically discursive accounts by postcolonial scholars draw attention to such issues. Consequently, Singapore’s multiracial and middle-class urban polity is sandwiched in a division of “self” and “other” that places European and other First World expatriates above Singaporeans and immigrant/transient workers

222

hidden hands and divided landscapes

beneath them, although neither of these categories are constituent citizenry. As such, the distinctive cultures that are produced by these various groups and are evident in quotidian spaces and spatial practices interrupt the plural national narrative, a narrative considerably weakened by the homogeneous middle-class aspirations of Singaporean citizens. But at what point does an economic model for citizenship convert to a social one? The seeds of this argument can be found in the work of Robbie Goh in his observation that postcolonial urban contestations may take various forms that do not reproduce the Marxist dialectic.13 His notion of “DialogiCity” proposes to examine “the multiple and ongoing discursive engagements (including their contradiction, disagreements and ironic conclusions), which characterize urban culture, particularly in an overdetermined space like Singapore.”14 In short, the link between overdetermination and its resultant multiplicity, articulated by Goh through varied urban phenomena, is relevant to this conclusion. Goh’s analyses encompasses civic and communal spaces, public housing, labor, and global projections, which in his view trace the Contours of Culture that operate across familiar constructions of social difference. In fact architecture, as cultural artifacts tied to economic processes, offers ideal sites for the dialogic reconstitution of interdependent economic and cultural meanings discussed by Goh. Such artifacts embody varied forms of cultural and economic pluralism. How do these spaces reciprocate notions of plurality generated in the colonial prison? The recurrence of the duality of colonial political structures in postcolonial national policy and its manifestation in both architectural and urban production after independence links the spatial divisions in the colonial city to postcolonial subject formation. By focusing on marginality, illegality, migration, and the divisiveness of spatial and political categories, postcolonial scholarship explores how individual city-zenship, or identities associated with urban life in capital cities, has become central to this process. When applied to architecture, such studies identify spaces that are physically and ideologically recognizable as postcolonial and are shaped by tensions of identity, political suppression, and nationalist self-construction. The forms of marginality, hybridity, and difference that were identified in colonial relationships persist as “a racialized politics of differentiation,” which is acted out in struggles over geographical space and through contemporary “multicultural” policies.15 Issues of difference draw attention to social groups that are located outside proper citizenship and are accordingly marginalized in the distribution of spatial and political entitlements. As described by Kaplan and Holloway, the persistence and nature of ethnic segregation is affected by attitudes toward immigration, foreignness, and ethnic minorities within a society.16 This is particularly visible in postcolonial contexts where colonial “divide and rule” policies create

conclusion

223

political divisions along ethnic lines, which persist in democratic polities after independence. This process can be both extroverted, due to the continued relationship of immigrants with their homelands, or introverted, where the primary focus of immigrants is in creating an identity within the host city.17 As argued by Nihal Perera, the postcolonial identity of the nationalist state is typically negotiated in its urban or metropolitan capital, where particular local identities are produced by marginalizing or effacing others.18 Likewise, postindustrial social stratification has an ethnic dimension, which is evident in spatial divisions. More often the patterns of these contemporary migrations follow colonial migrations from the colony to the metropole and feed historic social asymmetries and their attendant prejudices. Construction workers from South Asia who are employed in contemporary Singapore, albeit voluntarily, replicate the channels of labor exchange carved out by their predecessors as indentured laborers and transported prisoners. They reinforce associations of South Asians with a laboring class. The restriction and regulation of worker mobility bears comparison with penal policy, while the graduation of race by labor was first exercised within the colonial prison system. However, a recent influx of IT professionals has changed this demographic so that once again the Indian community occupies two ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. While the percentage of Indian blue-collar workers has declined from 15 percent to 8 percent, that of professionals and managerial workers has doubled from 22 percent to 43 percent of the Indian workforce.19 Consequently, Singaporean citizens are sandwiched between professionals and laborers of the same racial and cultural demographic. Permanent residents or guest workers constitute nearly 25 percent of Singapore’s Indian population, ninety thousand in number, thus replicating in a microcosm the demographic ratios of Singapore’s citizens to foreign and expatriate workers. In Malaysia, the situation appears to be more critical. There it is estimated (by popular sources) that there are 1.91 million foreign workers compared with 1.88 million Indians.20 Racialized labor categories that originated in colonial contexts and have subsequently structured contemporary city life forestall the blurring of racial/cultural categories. Indian Singaporeans find that while Indian culture is rejuvenated by the influx of new immigrants, it remains distinct from Indian Singaporean identity, even reducing its authenticity by comparison.21 The impact of new Indian immigrants is felt far more acutely by Singapore’s 7.9 percent Indian minority than it is felt by the larger population. Their experience provides an intense site of a broader condition rooted in colonial history. The Singapore government’s co-option of the island’s colonial history, its Western influences, and its exclusion of labor from discourses of Singapore citizenship alerts us to persistent postcolonial undercurrents, which as argued in this

224

hidden hands and divided landscapes

book are reflected spatially in the country’s political self-construction as city and state. As Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh observe, “[d]ecolonization is a process of emancipation through mirroring, a mix of defiance and mimesis. Like colonialism itself, it is deeply preoccupied with boundaries—boundaries of territory and identity, borders of nations and state.”22 Whereas a nationalist discourse is constructed through essentializing difference, “this logic is similar to that of colonial racism, except that the ‘other’ has become the self and the values are reversed.”23 Similarly, in their discussion of the Singapore government’s efforts to maintain colonial period demographic quotas, Janadas Devan and Geraldine Heng argue that “[a]n internalized ‘orientalism’ makes available to post colonial authority the knowledge-power that colonial authority wielded over the local population.”24 A study of architecture and urbanism reveals that lingering colonial hierarchies continue to influence the constitution of Singaporean subjects by the contemporary nation-state and that their deconstruction is crucial to effective decolonization. At the same time the plural political system produces reciprocal forms of subjectivity that organize race relations. At the close of this book it is useful to identify some of these divisive physical and social structures that originated in colonial policies. Our objective, however, is to question their continuing social relevance.

National Culture The landscape of contemporary Singapore bears many scars from its colonial and penal histories that are no longer meaningful to its history-shy citizens. The empty park at the center of the city, where the industrial prison was once located, has been claimed by a new institutional complex, appropriately linked to global commerce. Surrounding it is Singapore’s civic district, which due to its permanent and authoritative architecture has suffered far less at the hands of developers than have the adjacent ethnic enclaves. The purportedly universalized systems that accompany democratic government are undoubtedly manifested in this civic district, in institutions that during their colonial history shifted in their meaning from Anglo-European cultural artifacts to ostensibly neutral symbols of authority. The Government House, renamed the Istana, is the official residence of Singapore’s president, while Commercial Square, which was renamed Raffles Place in 1858, is an ornamental public space surrounded by corporate office towers at the heart of Singapore’s financial district.25 As observed by Robbie Goh, “the symbolism of power and justice in the postcolonial nation thus derives in many ways from the spatial forms inherited from the civic buildings of the colonial metropolis.”26 Not only are they privileged along with

conclusion

225

their historical significance and symbolism, but in accruing this new layer of national authority they marginalize the “uncivic” spaces and structures of “retrogressive Asian identity.”27 Unlike in Malaysia, where plural cultural distinctions are reinforced and atomized in the political sphere through the Islamic architecture of Putra Jaya, the Singaporean state borrows its cues from the residual and consequently acultural spaces of the colonial project. Historically the civic district implies the creation of citizenry that is modeled according to a European cultural template, an association that is continued by Singapore’s political elites. In contrast, the most productive site of citizenship construction for the ordinary citizenry occurs in Singapore’s private sphere, in an interesting yet complex inversion of public and private. At the height of the economy, in its most privileged local geographies, elite and expatriate residents occupy landed housing, a dear commodity in a land-scarce city-state, thus contributing to and perpetuating a form of internal colonialism. Their houses in fact often take the form of colonial or tropical bungalows and are located in elite neighborhoods once inhabited almost exclusively by Europeans. Several military encampments have retained clusters of colonial period housing that are available for lease, and these, along with their attendant lifestyle, are particularly attractive to the Western expatriate population. Private condominiums provide a third category of housing that signifies affluence. As observed previously, these categories make up 11.1 percent of the housing stock. The withdrawal of European, American, and Australian expatriates into gated communities (Portsdown Road, Seletar, Changi, Holland Village) and secure private properties away from the hustle and bustle of city life is reminiscent of both the garden suburbs of nineteenth-century urbanism and the refuge against native belligerence. Private home ownership of detached residences is unaffordable for the majority of Singaporeans who dwell in vast Housing Development Board (HDB) public housing estates, where private ownership is governed by public regulation. In Singapore, apartment ownership is the primary modern citizenship entitlement, and, as observed by Goh, carries a “significant ideological burden of the modern nation state.”28 These residential neighborhoods of prefabricated modernist apartment blocks, which are serviced by an up-to-date infrastructure, are organized as satellite townships: dormitory settlements surrounding the metropolitan center, and are ethnically integrated. In fact, writes Goh, they have come to symbolize “the nation’s own path to modernity,” and the socioeconomic profile of apartment owners converges with the national profile for a middle-class “stakeholder” citizenry.29 The HDB’s responses to ethnicity are particularly revealing. Following communal violence in 1964 and as a deterrent to further violence, the Singapore government used its housing policy to prevent the formation of ethnic ghettos. Racial integration was achieved by (a) allocating apart-

226

hidden hands and divided landscapes

ments according to strict ethnic percentages that reflect larger demographic ratios, (b) requiring a member of a particular ethnic group to sell only to another of the same ethnicity within a prescribed quota, and (c) artificially inflating the price of properties and thus magnifying the individual’s investment in the national economy.30 Although public housing acts as a homogeneous grid that imposes a common Singaporean subjectivity on equal citizens, it simultaneously identifies and individuates ethnic difference. Its operation is not unlike the grid of the cellular model, limiting choice and space and reducing and segregating potentially disruptive collectives. The cultural neutrality of the architecture and the highly regulated and sanitized public spaces that surround it effectively strips it of ethnic associations, disciplining the stakeholder population while claiming their loyalty to the nation-state. As observed by Goh, this strategy “removes from the heart of communal housing the signs of racial and cultural differentiation such as vernacular design elements and ritual spaces.”31 The void deck (the free area on the ground floor, which is raised on pilottis) substitutes as a communal space for religious rites and funeral rites. Ethnicity is thus disciplined and aesthetically neutralized in the grid of everyday space and reorganized to prevent physically or spatially inscribed forms of collective action. Indian Singaporeans, as a small minority within this Chinese-dominated grid, often find themselves culturally isolated and socially marginalized. Meanwhile, the symbolic sites of these collectives, the metropolitan areas associated with Chinese, Malay, and Indian settlement, have been converted into a form of tourist spectacle. The gentrification and conservation of shophouse environments in the so-named “heritage districts” has removed internal divisions and converted them into exclusively residential (hotels) or commercial properties (restaurants, shops, and offices), and their former inhabitants have been relocated in public housing. As designated tourist districts the “ethnic” shophouse neighborhoods are expected to attract contemporary Western or Westernized tourists. In fact, the heritage districts “orientalize” the immigrant histories of Singapore’s ethnic communities and repackage them as historic narratives of traditional, parochial, and premodern cultures and behaviors. Within the larger distribution of race and class in the global economy, Singapore’s plural society is located as a privileged site of local citizenship. The contemporary interpretation of plural citizenship, as homogeneous yet divided categories set in the vertical grid of urban apartments, expands upon the many readings of the grid we have encountered so far. The spatial distinctions between the detached housing of expatriates and the dormitory settlements in their rigidly disciplined urban landscape echo the relative advantages and treatments experienced in the dual city. Thus, the systems of entitlements and restraint

conclusion

227

through which specific categories of modern subjects were measured during the colonial period persist. However, graduated systems of “property ownership” and the disciplining of apartment-dwelling subjects into forms of “social modernity” (hygiene, politeness, order) coincide with the creation of a stakeholder citizenry and the successful elimination of homelessness. Chua Beng Huat argues that the Singapore government finds the plural ideology politically useful for freezing cultural categories in a traditional model and thus suppressing the cultural critiques that inevitably emerge in a capitalist culture.32 He notes that the consequence of this approach is modernization without modernity, where the government is reluctant to face the cultural costs of capitalism. In Singapore, racial categories are introduced as cultures, and incidents of racial unrest in neighboring countries are used by the government to justify the strict policing of racial boundaries and the neutralizing of cultural politics. In Chua’s view, such abstractions keep social, cultural, and political spheres conservative and Singaporean identity becomes “a space that is both too-full and an absence.”33 What is most interesting in the Singapore case, however, is that the majority of the citizens do not regard their unitary citizenship as incompatible with reductive plural categories and find comfort in its ambivalence. They inhabit a paradox, a divided, culturally defined nativity and a unitary geographic statehood, which in turn provokes an anxious subjectivity and a tenuous modern national consciousness. The citizens’ anxiety reaches its crisis during the preparatory period prior to the National Day celebrations in August, when citizenship and geography are reiterated through a national parade sponsored by the state. During the celebrations, cultural performances by each ethnic community, dressed in their traditional attire, represent the plural categories that are prescribed by the state. As described in the chorus of a song composed as part of the National Day celebrations in 2002, Every creed and every race Has its role and has its place One people, one nation, one Singapore.34

Ananda Rajah observes that the presence and performance of different ethnic groups within the National Day parade signify “cultural” differences within the nation rather than a common sense of nation or imagined community.35 In Singapore, unitary citizenship manifests itself in the cadence of “Singlish” (Singapore English), which is influenced by Chinese and Malay expressions, and in a hybrid food culture, which consumes the Singaporean imagination and is associated with specific food stalls in particular neighborhoods. These cultural practices are often intangible and temporal and may not be manifested in physical urban

228

hidden hands and divided landscapes

expressions. Even the hybrid shophouse architecture is subject to plural categorization, and the attributes of Chinese Malay and Indian shophouses are prized apart in Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) publications.36 More often, it is the knowledge of such temporal experiences that is disseminated and used to construct a fragile geographic imagination. Due to the denial of the plurality of language and space and due to their segregation into separate cultural categories, the dialogic potential of Singaporeanness is suppressed. The overarching structure of Anglophile civic institutions and the subservience of linguistic difference to the authority of English, the language of the marketplace, suggest the overwhelmingly economic focus of the Singaporean state.

Divisive Strategies The global division of labor, which graduates different entitlements in Singapore’s neutral urban template, bears comparison with the plural politics of the colonial penal model. Singapore’s foreign labor component can be divided into two categories, foreign talent and foreign workers, who collectively contributed 36.9 percent of the GDP growth from 1991 to 2000, compared to the 14.1 percent contributed by local labor.37 As observed by Goh, an official discourse of necessity, voiced repeatedly at National Day rallies, reconciles citizens to the unpopular policy of wooing highly skilled expatriates while displacing anxieties regarding the foreign presence onto unskilled foreign workers.38 This differentiation of skilled and unskilled foreigners according to their social value is achieved primarily through a pass system issued by the Ministry of Manpower.39 Employment passes are issued to individuals providing specialized services, whereas work permits are offered to individuals or groups who are controlled by an employer or agent. Within this pass hierarchy, P and Q passes for foreign professionals, managers, and specialists are graduated according to income, educational qualification, and professional skills, and they qualify for dependent and social visit passes for family members. The active headhunting of foreigners in the financial sector and enticements to Fortune 500 companies augment this category, and the civic and cultural landscapes are designed with them in mind. The next categories of S passes are for middle-level skilled manpower such as technicians, and R passes are for semiskilled and unskilled foreign workers. The latter do not qualify for dependent privileges. In the construction industry a large percentage of skilled labor comes daily into Singapore from neighboring Malaysia, where the closest city, Johor Bahru, located just across the causeway, thrives on Singapore’s proximity. The remaining labor comes from regional neighbors, and unskilled labor is largely from China, Thailand, and South Asia, including India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.40 The numbers of South Asian la-

conclusion

229

borers increased considerably during the building boom in the early 1990s and has been a major source of inexpensive labor since then.41 The pass categories are further divided, for example P1, P2, and Q1, who fall within the S$2,500 to S$7,000 and over (per month) salary range and are graduated accordingly. At the lowest level in the R category are construction workers and female domestic helpers, who are governed by levies and contracts negotiated directly between the employer and the state. Construction work, as outlined in the Employment of Foreign Manpower Employment Act, includes (among others) building construction and demolition, dredging and land reclamation, road works, earth works, marine construction works, and landscaping, all of which are familiar categories found in penal reports of public works.42 The complex graduation of labor and entitlements is comparable to the penal class system, although the R category does not have the option of permanent residence. Although restrictive policies and heavy penalties regulate the transient labor system in Singapore, savings accrued (augmented through the difference in exchange rates) and opportunities to learn modern methods and practices are some of its advantages. As in the colonial period, opportunities for subjectivity or self-construction are found at the margins and outside citizenship. Laborers outside national knowledge systems (such as education, newspapers, and other media) construct alternative ways of knowing and negotiating the city due to their involvement in urban construction. This knowledge is disseminated to compatriots and fellow workers, producing a regional understanding of the global city that counters both official and global/transnational representations. However, the restrictions applied to this class of urban workers prevent dialectical responses (strikes and legal action) from taking shape and limit transient activity to dialogic spaces and practices. The consequent docility of an imported working class has been exceedingly beneficial to the country’s rapid development. Indeed, Singapore’s progress can be partially attributed to a productive politics of labor management. The “dual economy” associated with colonialism is translated into the cohabitation of a high-tech computerized professional class and a low-wage, labor-intensive system of production within the same economy. This is not unusual for a postcolonial state in Asia and is true of many of Singapore’s neighbors. However, it is Singapore’s urban context and “developed” or “First World” economic status that helps construct the parameters of Western orientation, middle-class population, and modernity, which assume a magnified role in the eyes of its less-developed regional neighbors and draw attention to its differentiated labor practices. The comparative privileges of Singaporean citizenship are likewise demonstrated to and against the public visibility of transnational and transient workers from economically less-developed nations.

230

hidden hands and divided landscapes

So how do we understand the changing demographic patterns introduced by economic liberalization in India? How does it impact the carefully managed categories and associations of Singapore’s plural model? In an article in a “Little India” community newspaper, Zafar Anjum observes, “Almost a quarter of the Indian population, 90,000, are permanent residents—[or] noncitizens who live and work in Singapore, mostly as financial services professionals, computer engineers, construction labor and domestic help.”43 A comprehensive economic cooperation agreement with India in 2007 has encouraged Indian investment, and 1,400 Indian companies have set up offices in Singapore, constituting the fourth largest contingent of foreign firms. The influx of educated Indians, moreover, raises the profile of Singapore’s Indian community, where less than 8 percent have college degrees.44 In the past ten years, increasing numbers of Indian IT professionals have qualified for P passes, blurring the associations of race and relative entitlements. Although the presence of Indian professionals and their families has undoubtedly impacted the space of “Little India,” their labor is not visible or public unlike their poorer compatriots, the “foreign workers.” Indian expatriates live in private housing, in condominiums located outside HDB estates, often intersecting with zones inhabited by other groups of “foreign talent.”45 They are eligible for permanent resident status. By comparison, Indian transient workers are typically employed on building projects for periods not exceeding four years under an employment levy, paid to the receiving government.46 As unskilled laborers, they cannot seek residency status. Through their labor the nation is able to realize its modern urban vision even while prolonging preindustrial labor methods and practices. For example, it is not unusual to see makeshift timber scaffolding envelope a building or to find construction laborers living and cooking on site. Although they facilitate the rapid construction of the modern city, opportunities for transient labor are governed by labor legislation that prevents unionization or industrial action.47 Since each worker is entirely dependent on the sponsorship of the employer, the contract and its duration limit worker mobility, and their control is rationalized through a system of relative entitlements. In Singapore, construction labor constitutes a foreign social underclass, which constructs the spaces of model citizenship while occupying a space outside it.48 This temporal labor force shadows the First World citizenry as they embark on their everyday lives in their modern urban environments. A large number of transient construction workers are deployed in building public housing projects in Singapore, which contain the intimate spatial units of citizenship. In the derelict shophouses of ethnic neighborhoods, transient workers are engaged in conservation for adaptive re-use, and they prepare the historic heritage districts for tourism and gentrification. Often residing in one derelict shophouse

conclusion

231

while tearing down and rebuilding another, the transient workers participate in a process by which knowledge is dismantled and reappropriated by urban processes and state institutions.49 On weekends when they gather together in cultural enclaves or designated meeting spots, transient workers map an alternative landscape of ethnic difference across the nation’s public sphere. As in the colonial period, the unstructured movement from private to public space of an urban underclass causes considerable anxiety in Singaporeans. Reports on the immoral or criminal activities of construction workers, often exaggerated in the media, generate efforts to discipline them by using physical barriers, while their public behavior is policed in a variety of ways. Loitering, which is identified as “an uneconomic and unprofitable behaviour in a society strongly motivated by commerce,” is a constant target of such measures.50 In fact, signs discouraging loitering or gathering in interstitial spaces, a form of leisure unmediated by the economy, have appeared in Little India’s public spaces. As observed by Goh, even as Indian cultural identity is heightened for tourist consumption, illegitimacy is contained, thus defining acceptable and unacceptable forms of ethnicity.51

City-zenship As theorized by Aihwa Ong, transnational citizens, while moving across national boundaries, recognize the meanings and institutions of global capital.52 Although diasporic subjects like their subaltern equivalents are regarded as oppressed classes that are constitutionally opposed to state power and capitalism, argues Ong, there are “complicated accommodations alliances and creative tensions” that are often overlooked.53 Transnationality in fact stimulates a more flexible and complex relationship between capital and governments and new methods for maintaining strategic controls over resources, populations, and sovereignty.54 As in Malaysia, ethnicity becomes a “sorting mechanism for defining the meaning of and claims on sovereignty” for different racial groups, and very different citizenship entitlements articulate each group’s relationship to global capital and national resources.55 Privileges offered to the Malays (early immigrants) combine birthright with geographic entitlement, while Chinese and Indians who immigrated during the colonial period (1511–1957) are discriminated against in official policies toward business and education. In Singapore, although citizenship is not graduated by race, social and cultural relationships, labor policy, and state experiments in “social engineering” reproduce racial asymmetries. While the persistence of racial/cultural hierarchies as an undercurrent of egalitarian official policies is inherited directly from colonialism, Singapore is also confronted with its legacy of porous boundaries and globalization, which have a longer precolonial past. Dependence upon a transient labor force draws alternative cultural

232

hidden hands and divided landscapes

formations and temporal/spatial imaginaries within the ambit of national discourse. However, the exclusion of transients from national or social representations of the urban landscape and their alliance with and return to their original environments characterizes their autonomy. For these reasons, it appears that including labor in urban narratives would generate a very different understanding of Singapore’s city-space and citizenship. It would challenge the idea that the contemporary city and society is equitable to urban residents and would draw attention to its spatial and social divisions. In short, the calculation of transient labor into analyses of the city would dispel the myth of liberalism, property ownership, the free market, and sedentarization of populations as the chief characteristic of modern urbanism. In fact, in contemporary Singapore the mobility in public and consequent proximity of a large, racially distinct labor force has proved disconcerting and has provoked concern among its citizenry regarding latent colonial attitudes and practices.56 Exactly because of their social invisibility and political impotency, transient workers are free to imagine their own national subjectivity, unlike Singaporean citizens or expatriates, who are defined by bourgeois national citizenship. Transients do not share in the crisis of belonging and self-negation or in the compulsion to assimilate that are experienced by marginal diasporic communities. Against the mobility of the laboring subject, proper citizenship appears to be a system of constraints that is graduated in public space. For example, contemporary laws prohibit Singaporeans from organizing public gatherings exceeding ten persons without prior application.57 In contrast, labor transience and exclusion from citizenship offer the worker comparative public freedoms. In response to this enduring paradox, temporal weekend gatherings of transient laborers are a familiar occurrence in Singapore’s public space, and they hold in abeyance reformative discourses on urban citizenship. The Serangoon area is transformed from a weekday tourist spectacle to a South Asian public sphere, where nativity on the subcontinent and various forms of South Asian citizenship and subjectivity are learned through comparison and contestation. The visibility of this poorer class of foreigners whose loyalties lie elsewhere and whose habits are often shaped by the rural environments they come from exacerbates the anxieties of Singapore’s growing urban middle class. There are elements of the “carnivalesque” in their pervasive claim on the public sphere through appropriation of negative space, alleyways and lane ways, public transport and open space, and the areas surrounding religious buildings. Protests by construction workers outside the Indian embassy for non-payment of salaries provoke anxiety in the public, while the embassy prefers not to get involved.58 The anxiety and the resultant instability provoked by a ubiquitous transient labor force open up the spaces for cultural dialogue.

conclusion

233

Dialogic Spaces During the course of this book we have encountered various interpretations of the dialogic, as a limited space for temporal forms of resistance when sustained dialectical responses are not possible, as an environment wherein the economy deliberately engages and orchestrates the productivity of various classes of participants, and as a space for cultural dialogue across plural categories. We have seen that the cultural instability caused by immigrant activity (the constant movement of labor) in colonial Singapore produced such an environment and that the colonial prison evolved as a microcosm of this broader social condition. In concluding, this chapter explores a dynamic site of Indian Singaporean cultural production, which epitomizes the dialogic potential of sustained immigrant influx. My choice of a festival/carnival procession links this example back to Muharram and to Bakhtin’s readings of the urban carnivalesque. Numerical increases in Indian immigrants to Singapore have led to an exponential increase in festival participation, with different outcomes across social class.59 More importantly, unlike the static and contained representations of their culture in the National Day parade, in the private cultural sphere of the religious festival local Indians are free to reproduce themselves on their own terms. Perhaps for this reason, there is a long history of anxiety surrounding such transformations of Indian festivals during the twentieth century, up until the late 1990s, as documented in the work of Vineeta Sinha.60 Whereas the Kling festivals Muharram and Dusserah (popular with Muslim Indians and Bengalis) were the objects of colonial regulation during the nineteenth century, contemporary Thaipusam and Theemithi (Tai Pucam and Timiti), South Indian Hindu festivals, raise similar issues, signaling the subsequent shift in the religious constitution of the Indian diaspora. Thaipusam in particular, a festival to the god Murugan, which is popular among rural Saiva Tamilians in India, appears to have crossed class lines in Singapore and become an important signifier of Indian Singaporean cultural identity.61 Sinha describes the festival as embodying an important feature of Singaporean Hinduism, with cultural practices that are quite distinct from those of India. It encompasses both non-Tamil and non-Hindu participants.62 Thaipusam has many of the attributes of Muharram, of self-flagellation and mortification in public, manifested in this case through piercing the skin or drawing the vel kavadi, a portable altar attached to the devotee by skewers.63 The pedestrian procession between the Perumal Temple on Serangoon Road and the Murugan Temple on Tank Road takes devotees across city space, interrupting traffic. Since it is not officially recognized as a public holiday, the public privileges afforded to Thaipusam are governed by various measures regulating times, crowd behavior, litter, and tickets and permits to carry kavadi (burdens).64 Although Theemithi (which precedes Deepavali) has a similar ritual walk, its

234

hidden hands and divided landscapes

primary act of penance through fire walking is confined to the compound of the Sri Mariamman Temple.65 In contrast, Deepavali, which is legislated as a public holiday, is associated with private and familial practices. Sinha argues that despite the regulatory disciplinary systems governing these festivals, the “polyglossia of Hinduism” remains outside the grasp of the state.66 They also appear to evade the systems of orthodoxy originating in the subcontinent. In devotional songs to the god Muneeswaran, for example, “references to countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, names of ayya temples in different locations in the region, and even road names of particular sites of worship are incorporated into the lyrics,” writes Sinha.67 In fact the Taoist deity Tua Peh Kong and Muneeswaran are often found in local Indian temples and the two gods are regarded as brothers.68 However, recent debates over the transformation of Thaipusam (during the 1980s and 1990s) can be read as efforts by orthodox Hindus to draw the festival back to its devotional purpose, limiting the exhibitionist dimension of mortification and invigilating against what they describe as the “carnival” element. Supporters of kavadi bearers are said to be “playing musical instruments, singing sacrilegious songs and romping about the streets.”69 Hindu youth identified as “unemployed” or “school dropouts” are said to be making “a spectacle of themselves on Thaipusam by rowdy behaviour.”70 Contrary to its role as a private festival for a Shaiva minority, Thaipusam has been steadily increasing in numbers. The 2007 festival was said to have attracted as many as nine thousand participants.71 It has also become a sensitive register of the economy, where, as stated by officers of the Hindu Endowments Board, devotees look to God both during economic downturns and upturns, generating increases in the numbers of kavadi.72 Social displays at Thaipusam correlate to forms of prestige, as is evident in the elaborate structures and prices of the kavadis as well as in the guests of honor who are invited to officiate: the deputy prime minister S. Jayakumar; Indian poet Dr. P. Muthappan; and even a “Chinese Singaporean” guest of honor, manpower minister Ng Eng Hen.73 Sikh and Chinese devotees among kavadi bearers suggest that a private celebration typically contained by class barriers within a minority religious group has become a significant marker of collective plural identity.74 The inclusion of priests, monks, and leaders of nine other religious communities in the 2000 festival suggests the broadening of Thaipusam’s multireligious and multiracial appeal.75 The reconstitution of the festival as a somber devotional practice and the identification and control of recalcitrant youth, appropriate to a private performance of religion, thus runs concurrently with the dialogic expansion of its reach. Dialogic practices also counter what Sinha describes as the “easy collapsing of the categories, ‘Hindu’ and ‘Indian’ as well as their interchangeable, unproblematic usage,” where ethnicity, culture, and customary practice are conflated and essentialized.76

conclusion

235

The participation of Indian, Indian Singaporean, and Singaporean citizens, who make different claims on festival space, transforms religious practices and meanings and impacts their cultural appeal and audience. Both public and private readings of culture continue to be contested and produced dialogically in this manner by orthodox devotees, national institutions, and global tourism, but the performance of unlicensed activities external to the Singapore state is not tolerated in public space in any shape or form. The distribution of political material and propaganda to bystanders (by the leader and party members of the opposition) at the Thaipusam procession in 1986 became central to a debate in parliamentary sessions, where an argument over the policing of festival music translated into the policing of political culture.77 While dialogic and dialectical practices are identifiable and appear to insinuate themselves thus in immigrant identities, the transformation of cultural practices in the space of the procession alerts us, once again, to alternative and unexpected sites of resistance.78 In summary, Singapore’s dependence on a transient labor force for its developmental urban projects and the resultant range of cultural practices questions top-down interpretations of economic and social progress that disregard the relevance of heterogeneous urban experiences to notions of subjectivity. The extrageographic nature of the national cultural imagination maintains the continued ambivalence of urban social experience. For example, hyphenated identities are seldom used in letters sent by readers to the national newspapers, and Singaporeans continue to reference each other by their CMIO racial/cultural categories. Meanwhile, the resurgence of asymmetric labor systems across historical periods demonstrates that colonial structures for graduated sovereignty and compliant subjectivity do persist. They help maintain marginality as the experimental ground against which proper citizenship is continuously constructed. The division of labor and the spatial entitlements first experimented with in the colonial prison recur in a model of graduated citizenship that cuts sharply across the official categories for cultural pluralism. By doing so, it reproduces dialogic cultural forms that are undoubtedly dynamic and productive to all those participating in the capitalist economy to varying degrees. They operate, however, within licensed and temporal domains where direct resistance is untenable and class consciousness is constructed against an immigrant “other.” The ultimate contest, it seems, is not between competing cultural communities but between the bounded nature of nationness and a history of open boundaries, endemic in the region’s cultural imprint.79

APPE N DICES

Appendix A: Significant Dates 1776 Penang is annexed by the British. 1789–1796 Andamans is designated a penal colony. 1789–1860 Convicts transported to Penang from Indian presidencies. 1795–1816 British take Melaka from the Dutch. 1797–1824 Benkulen is designated penal colony. 1807 British ships are forbidden to carry slaves. 1809 Province Wellesley is annexed by the British. 1833 Slaves in British possessions are emancipated. 1811–1816 Period of British administration in Java. 1819 The founding of Singapore by Stamford Raffles. 1824 Anglo-Dutch Treaty, and transfer of Melaka to the British. 1825 First batch of transportees from Benkulen arrive at Singapore. 1825–1867 The period of penal transportation to Singapore. 1826 The ratification of Anglo-Dutch Treaty. 1826–1827 Straits Settlements are incorporated, with Penang as the seat of administration. 1832 Administration is transferred to Singapore. 1846 Transportation from Ceylon to the Straits Settlements. 1852 Straits Settlements are no longer under the East India Company. 1852–1867 The presidency years. 1857 Mutiny in India. 1867 The Straits Settlements are declared a crown colony. Transpor- tation to the Straits Settlements ceases. 1873 Convict jail closes.

Appendix B: Governors of the Straits Settlements

Source, C. M. Turnbull, The Straits Settlements, chapter 2. 1824–1830: Robert Fullerton 1830–1833: Robert Ibbetson 1833–1836: Kenneth Murchison 1836–1843: George Bonham

1843–1855: William John Butterworth 1855–1859: Edmun Augustus Blundell 1859–1867: Orfeur Cavanagh 1867–1873: Harry St. George Ord

237

238

appendices

Appendix C: Census Census January 1824. Source, McNair, PTOW, 38. Europeans, 74; Armenians, 16; Arabs, 15; Malays, 4,580; Chinese, 3,317; Indians, 756; Bugis, 1,925; Total, 10,683.

Census 1849. Source, McNair, PTOW, 67. Europeans, 198; Eurasians, 304; Chinese, 24,790; Malays and Indians, 33,751; Total 59,043. Census 1850-1851. Source, F/4/2520, 144695, SS (1852, no.151) Convict Statements Reports 1850–1851 (M=Male; F=Female). Chinatown: Europeans, 42M, 16F; Indo-Britains 4M, 3F; Armenians 19M, 17F; Native Christian, 132M, 95F; Malays, 1,048M, 1,145F; Chinese, 6,057M, 1,053F; Bengalees, 78M, 35F; Klings, 1835M, 118F; Arabs, 21M, 5F; Javanese, 21M, 19F; Balinese, 8M, 17F; Bugis, 0; Coofrees, 2M; Jews, 8M; Siamese, 19M, 8F; Parsees, 12M. Kampung Gelam: Europeans, 51M, 27F; Indo-Britains, 13M, 60F; Armenians, 0; Native Christian, 130M, 110F; Malays, 596M, 754F; Chinese, 1,335M, 125F; Bengalees, 270M, 138F; Klings, 460M, 26F; Arabs, 2M; Javanese, 254M, 198F; Balinese, 298M, 35F; Bugis, 68M, 64F; Coofrees, 11M, 8F; Jews, 0; Siamese, 0; Parsees, 0. Country Districts: Europeans, 12; Indo-Britains 6; Armenians, 0; Native Christian, 7; Malays, 2,115; Chinese, 493; Bengalees, 10; Klings, 8; Arabs, 0; Javanese, 169; Balinese, 65; Bugis, 715; Coofrees, 3; Jews, 0; Siamese, 0; Parsees, 0. Total: Europeans, 167; Indo-Britains, 153; Armenians, 36; Native Christian, 467; Malays, 9,034; Chinese, 17,179; Bengalees, 540; Klings, 2,607; Arabs, 28; Javanese, 1,034; Balinese, 661; Bugis, 1,994; Coofrees, 24; Jews, 8; Siamese, 27; Parsees, 12; Itinerants, 4,000; Military, 450; Continental convicts, 1,182; Local prisoners, 80. Census 2 April 1871. Source, CO 273/58, 100, SS, 259, Ord to Earl of Kimberley, 22 July 1872. Singapore: Malay, 19,250; Chinese, 54,572; Klings, 9,297. Penang: Malay, 70,464; Chinese, 36,561; Klings, 6,823. Melaka: Malay, 57,574; Chinese, 30,456; Klings, 2,874. Total: Malay, 147,188; Chinese, 103,936 (86,649M, 17,287F); Klings, 18,994; Europeans/Americans, 1,730; Javanese, 4,665; 21 Different Eastern nationalities, 31,584; Total, 308,097.

appendices

239

Appendix D: Superintendents of Convicts with Dates of Appointment (where known) 1825 Lt. Chester, Major Campbell 1833–1841 G. D. Coleman (architect & surveyor), Capt. Stevenson (12th Modern Native Infantry) 1844–1853 J. T. Thompson (surveyor) 1845–1855 Captain/Lt. Col. Henry Man 1855, Melaka 1857 Captain Ronald Macpherson (Madras Artillery). 1857 Captain Purvis (Madras Artillery) 1860s W. D. Bayliss 1857–1875 Lt. J. F. A. McNair (later Major) (Madras Artillery) 1875 Digby Henry Dent 1875–1893 Major W. R. Grey 1893 E. M. Merewether (later Sir)

Appendix E: Classification of Convicts 1 Source, IOR F/4/2520 144695, India Judicial (1851, no. 17): Capt. Man to T. Church Resident Councilor, Singapore, 1 August 1851 (roll on the 30th April 1851). Females were only found in 1st and 6th classes.

Convict Roll: Bengal: 1st class, 78M; 2nd class, 1; 3rd class, 19; 4th class, 0; 5th class 1; 6th class, 6M, 1F; Total, 106. Madras: 1st class, 104M, 5F; 2nd class, 67; 3rd class, 393; 4th class, 83; 5th class, 22; 6th class, 20M, 22F; Total, 716. Bombay: 1st class, 38M, 2F; 2nd class, 39; 3rd class, 379; 4th class, 36; 5th class, 8; 6th class, 11M, 19F; Total, 532. 1st class, 220M, 7F; 2nd class, 107; 3rd class, 794; 4th class, 140; 5th class, 32; 6th class, 37M, 42F; Total, 1,379. Classification of the Offenses of the convicts on the 30th April 1851: Bengal: murder, 18; burglary, 5; robbery with violence, 63; piracy, 1; forgery, 1; arson, 4; treason, 12; returning from transportation and escape, 1; Total, 105M, 1F. Madras: murder, 218M, 23F; manslaughter, 1; cutting and wounding, 18M, 1F; burglary, 6M, 1F; robbery with violence, 362; larceny, 3; forgery, 1; mutiny, 10; arson, 28; assault, common and aggravating, 11M, 1F; treason, 25; returning from transportation and escape, 3; miscellaneous offenses, 3; total, 689M, 27F.

240

appendices

Bombay: murder, 169M, 20F; manslaughter, 9; cutting and wounding, 17M, 1F; burglary, 8; robbery with violence, 135; larceny, 46; piracy, 4; forgery, 5; arson, 5; assault, common and aggravating, 1; treason, 96; returning from transportation and escape, 2; miscellaneous offenses, 14; total, 511M, 21F. Hong Kong: cutting and wounding, 4; burglary, 3; robbery with violence, 3; larceny, 2; piracy, 12; arson 1, total, 25. Total: murder, 440; manslaughter, 10; cutting and wounding, 41; burglary, 23; robbery with violence, 564; larceny, 51; piracy, 17; forgery, 7; mutiny, 10; arson, 38; assault, common and aggravating, 13; treason, 133; returning from transportation and escape, 6; miscellaneous offenses, 18; total, 1,379.

Appendix F: Classification of Convicts 2 Source, IOR F/4/2520, 144695, SS (1852, no. 151), Convict statements reports 1850–1851. Resident Councilor to the Office of Governor, Singapore PWI and Melaka, 10 August 1852 (no. 7).

Convict Roll: The number of convicts transported to the island from the period it became a penal settlement, April 1825 to 30 April 1852, aggregates 3,512: Bengal, 595; Madras, 1,695; Bombay, 1,190; Hong Kong, 32. There were 1,470 convicts in Singapore in 1852. From among these: died at the station, 1355; released, 225; absconded, 82; murdered, 10; died on board ship, 26; transferred to Malacca, 186; transferred to Penang, 125; not landed, 12; committed suicide, 11; killed by tigers, 3; drowned, 3; executed, 4. Typical Offenses: Murder, 1,459; manslaughter, 12; cutting and wounding, 134; burglary, 913; larceny, 210; piracy, 24; forgery, 17; mutiny, 25; homicide, 4; arson, 30; aggravated assault, 26; returning from transportation, 15; miscellaneous, 52; treason and rebellion, 330; dacoity, 94; felony, 30; sedition, 19; perjury, 1; offense not specified, 70; robbery with violence, 930. Value of Labor 1851–1852 (in Rupees-annas-pies): Total, 95,844-6-6; roadworks, 26,789-3-9; perm. detachments, 21,335-8-7; miscellaneous, 3,249-6; new buffalo shed, 266-14-5; laterite, 2339-13-5; sea wall, 24,829-10-6; cement kiln, 4,000-15; boat quay wall, 9,306-1-2; new convict lines, 3,726-13-8.

appendices

241

Class of Diseases: Fevers, consumptive, lungs, liver, stomach and bowels, brain, generative and urinary organs, eye, skin, cholera, dropsies, rheumatic afflictions, abscesses and ulcers, wounds and injuries, others. Total 3,054 treated and 115 died.

Appendix G: Classification of Convicts 3 Source, IOR P/145/42 (19 June 1856): Abstract from classification of convicts at PWI for quarter ending March 1856.

Penang: Bengal, 1st class, 45M, 21F; 2nd class, 11; 3rd class, 32; 4th class, 142; 5th class, 3; 6th class, 75M, 8F; Total, 337. Madras, 1st class, 35M, 1F; 2nd class, 50; 3rd class, 108; 4th class, 53; 5th class, 8; 6th class, 46M, 2F; Total, 302. Bombay, 1st class, 20M, 32F; 2nd class, 99; 3rd class, 303; 4th class, 111; 5th class, 14; 6th class, 28M, 21F; Total, 628. Total, 1st class, 99M, 54F; 2nd class, 162; 3rd class, 495; 4th class, 343; 5th class, 28; 6th class, 180; Total, 1361. Melaka (no females): Bengal, 1st class, 23; 2nd class, 11; 3rd class, 142; 4th class, 17; 5th class, 36; 6th class, 16; Total, 245. Madras, 1st class, 32; 2nd class, 6; 3rd class, 16; 4th class, 0; 5th class, 0; 6th class, 3; Total, 57. Bombay, 1st class, 12; 2nd class, 21; 3rd class, 9; 4th class, 40; 5th class, 1; 6th class, 13; Total, 96. Ceylon: 1st class, 22; 2nd class, 25; 3rd class, 85; 4th class, 4; 5th class, 2; 6th class, 20; total, 158. Total, 1st class, 89; 2nd class, 63; 3rd class, 252; 4th class, 161; 5th class, 39; 6th class, 52; Total, 656. Singapore: Bengal, 1st class, 61; 2nd class, 9; 3rd class, 381; 4th class, 38; 5th class, 9; 6th class, 33M, 59F; Total, 590. Madras, 1st class, 165M, 24F; 2nd class, 75; 3rd class, 308; 4th class, 14; 5th class, 16; 6th class, 42; Total, 644.

242

appendices

Bombay, 1st class, 43M, 19F; 2nd class, 79; 3rd class, 257; 4th class, 61; 5th class, 9; 6th class, 46M, 8F; Total, 96. Hong Kong, 1st class, 0; 2nd class, 0; 3rd class, 34; 4th class, 46; 5th class, 0; 6th class, 2; Total, 82. Total, 1st class, 269M, 43F; 2nd class, 163; 3rd class, 980; 4th class, 159; 5th class, 34; 6th class, 123M, 67F; Total, 1,838.

Appendix H: Revenue Convict Expenditure Source, PRO CO 273/32, SS, 145: Expenditure 1868 (in Rupees-annas-pies).

Singapore 1868: Money allowances Gratuities to convict artificers Rations for convicts Clothing Materials for manufacture Passage for convicts Contingent charges Total Singapore 1870: Money allowances Gratuities to convict artificers Rations for convicts Clothing Materials for manufacture Maintenance of prisoners in India Passage for convicts Contingent charges Total

12,295-74 2,991 26,403-74 3,903-18 213-38 -------------1,505-37 47,312-41

13,000 3,600 25,000 4,000 -------------10,000 850 2,200 58,650

Appendix I: Distribution of Convict Labor at Singapore Based on lists in IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial (1851, no. 17): Capt. Man to T. Church, Resident Councilor, Singapore, 1 August 1851.

appendices

243

Permanent detachments of men: Government Hill, Botanical Gardens, number grinding grain and sweeping jails, invalids cutting grass, looking after trees, watching jail stores, town and Kampong Gelam sweepers, revenue surveyors, killing dogs, employed at recorder’s house, employed at new sheriff’s jail, carpenters employed in the house of correction, convict hospital orderlies, collecting firewood for 4th and 5th classes and house of correction, sewing convict clothes for 1st and 5th classes, repairing boats, roofing convict jails, making peons belts, making bricks and tiles and conveying firewood, buffalo shed men, blacksmiths and carpenters, cutting timber, erecting shed in convict lines, invalids cleaning and watching lines, collecting stones on Dr. Oxley’s hill, women cutting grass at esplanade, collecting rattan and making baskets, making sieves, blasting rocks at Pedra Blanca, employed by superindendent of engineering, grass cutters. Miscellaneous Works: Rocher Bridge, River Valley Bridges, Laughing Road Bridges, Teluk Blangah Bridge, Kampung Melaka Bridge, erecting wells at the foot of Pearl’s Hill, coolies, building new convict lines. Local Prisoners: Rebuilding wall in convict hospital, sea wall account—mixing chunam (females), Boat Quay account—mixing chunam, cement kiln account— making cement, whitewashing lunatic asylum and repairing flooring, plastering the roof with cement in police station, squaring timber at the back of the convict jail, repairing book case for office, making sepoys tin bands, rebuilding a footbridge near convict jail, building cooking place in house of correction, painting bridge near institution.

Appendix J: Convict Returns Number of Indian Convicts in the Straits Settlements 1810–1873 (based on available information in various Straits Settlements records).

Sources: table 1, compiled by K. S. Sandhu in “Tamil and other Convicts in the Straits Settlements: A.D. 1790–1873” in Proceedings of the First International Conference of Tamil Studies, Kuala Lumpur, 1966, 203; CO273/19,195: Convict Returns May 1868; PRO CO 273/16, 120: Memorandum (no. 1) of the expense of the convict body in the SS.

244

appendices

Year 1810: Penang, 1; Total, 1,300. Year 1824: Penang, 1,462; Total, 1,462. Year 1855: Penang, 1,358; Melaka, 648; Singapore, 1,839; Total, 3,845. Year 1859: Penang, 1,302; Melaka, 541; Singapore, 2,329; Total, 4,172. Year 1860: Penang, 1,256; Melaka, 532; Singapore, 2, 275; Total, 4,063. Year 1865: Penang, 801; Melaka, 745; Singapore, 1,793; Total, 3,339. Year 1868: Penang, 606; Melaka, 632; Singapore, 1,298; Total, 2,536. Year 1873: Total, 1,815. Total Females: Penang, 166; Melaka, 2; Singapore, 236; Total, 404. TOL at May 1868: Penang, 134; Melaka, 46; Singapore, 413; Total, 593.

Appendix K: Convict Artificers F/4/2604, 163021, India Public, SS coll. no. 124, 54 and 55 (1854, no. 19): Organization of a body of convict artificers in the Straits, Blundell to Secretary, Govt. of India, Fort William, 28 February 54.

Penang: Carpenters, 35 @ 13.20; bricklayers, 35 @ 15.89; painters, 5 @ 1.0; Stone cutters, 5 @ .75; Black smiths, 5 @ 1.75; Brick makers, 15 @ 3.75; Total, 100 @ $ 36.34. Singapore: Masons, 48 @ 23.70; Stone cutters, 6 @ 2.50; Carpenters, 42 @ 14.30; Blacksmiths, 13 @ 5.90; Cement makers, 1@ .50; Basket maker, 1 @ .25; Lime maker, 1 @ .50; Quarry man, 1 @ .50; Total, 113 @ $ 48.15. Melaka: Carpenters, 7 @ 5.68; Blacksmiths, 3 @ .50; Brick layers, 16 @ 8.93; Painters, 5 @ 1.0; Lime burners, 7 @ 5.43; Total, 38 @ 21.54. Grand Total, 251 @ $ 106.3.

Appendix L: Convict Roll Based on F/4/2712, 194882, India Public, coll. 58 (1856, no. 130), 26: T. Church, Resident Councilor, Singapore to the Secretary to the Government, 25 October 1856. Medical report on the female convicts recently landed from “Sooblow Salam,” MacPherson, 10 July 1855.

appendices

245

Mupt Muha Rowar, News, 30 years, transportation for life—sore eyes and emaciated. Chooharree, Leia, 30 years, transportation for life—in good health. Golab Kour, Lahore, 30 years, transportation for life—health good has the itch. Klunra, Leia, 25 years, transportation for life—Anasarcons. Suddan, Lahore, 30 years, transportation for life—blind in left eye got itch. P. Ranee, Agra, 30 years, transportation for life—in good health. Rookna, Muttra, 60 years, transportation for life—in good health. Durboh, Saharampore, 30 years, transportation for life—blind of left eye otherwise healthy. Sumnah Agra, 25 years, transportation for life—in good health. Symceah, Agra, 22 years, transportation for life—in good health. Bhugga, Agra, 28 years, transportation for life—in good health. Mothee, Meeril, 26 years, transportation for life—got the itch. Victoria Adelaide Hassey, Benares, 16 years, transportation for life—in good health. Musst Sooija, Azingurh, 40 years, transportation for life—blind of right eye. Isundeea Solalun, Azingurh, 30 years, transportation for life—in good health. Nohnree, Mysore, 20 years, transportation for life—in good health.

Appendix M: Boria Verses Hamilton, A. W., “The Boria,” JSBRAS 82 (1920): 139–144 (translated with assistance from G. Paranthaman and Rozita Bte Ahmad) (*Hamilton’s translation).

Hutton Lane (toward Kedah Road) Laila Majnun orang yang muda Bersama adzab bersama sangsara Panji Sumerang ubah cherita Di- Jalan Hatin Kampong Melaka

Mc Alistar Road (Jalan Bahru) Kita Arab bangsa Maghrabi Di-dalam goa terkejut mimpi Dengar musoh di-dalam negeri Jalan Baharu sedia menanti Troop Albania jajahan Itali Ibarat rimau mati berdiri Alatan dunia ta’ambil peduli Jalan Baharu sedia menanti

246

appendices

Kedah Road (Kg Malacca) and Burmah Road (Tarek Ayer) Kami Sehir orang yang muda, Anak murid mahiran tua; Pulau Pinang datang mengembara Di-Tarek Ayer Kampong Melaka

Kimberley Street (Padang Garam) Askar Yunan Kuantong sama, Sudah ‘resign’ daripada China; Keluar menchari som, komkoma, Anak padang selamat sempurna

Dato Kermat Road beside the Jail (Kebun Nyior) (Nyuir = coconut?) Melayu penyamun tanah Inggelis Pantalon hitam baju puteh; Sa-barang kerja Melayuh buleh Di-kebun Nyior Seri Majlis The story of Laila Majnun the young man and the trials he encountered. The previous year’s story was Panji Sumerang. The troupe come from Huttons Lane (Kg Melaka)* Arabs we from stock of Morocco, Startled from dreams in the depth of a grotto. Hearing the foes within the gate, At Jalan Baharu we wait * Albanian troops under Italy, As brave as tigers, die standing. They don’t care about the ways of the world. They are ready and waiting at Jalan Bahru We are the young people of Sehir Students of an old expert Come traveling to Penang At Tarek Ayer in Kampong Melaka

appendices

The (triads) from Yunan and Kuan Tong are the same They left China Came out to find riches (make a living) This is a safe and perfect place for them Malay thieves on English land Wearing black trousers and white shirts The Malays can do any work They can make this nyior (coconut) orchard beautiful

247

NOTES

Abbreviations

FCO

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

IOR

India Office Records

NL

National Library (Singapore)

PRO

Public Records Office (CO: Colonial Office series)

SLNA

Sri Lanka National Archives

SS

Straits Settlements

SSR

Straits Settlements Records

Chapter 1: Introduction

1. “Dialogic,” a term used recently in discussions of postcolonial Singapore by Robbie Goh, is taken from the work of M. M. Bakhtin and will be discussed in detail during the course of this chapter. See Robbie Goh, Contours of Culture: Space and Social Difference in Singapore (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005). 2. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 3. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Pantheon, 1978); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). “Orientalism,” as theorized by Edward Said, refers to the discursive construction of Western cultural hegemony through an imaginary and unequal division between Eastern and Western cultures during the nineteenth century. By using a system of binary oppositions, such as self and other, to evaluate cultural differences, European scholars generalized colonial subjects as inferior and justified their exploitation and political domination by the West. The empirical methods that were used by the “orientalist” scholars concealed the politics of race that marked the colonial encounter. See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); and Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 12. 4. Michel Foucault, Power and Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); Antonio Gramsci, Selections from ‘The Prison Notebooks,’ ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971). 249

250

notes to pages 2–3

5. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies, 3–32 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 6. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: V. Gollancz, 1963); Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); James Francis Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san: Prostitution in Singapore, 1870­–1940 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1993); Rickshaw Coolie: A People’s History of Singapore, 1880–1940, East Asian Social Science Monographs (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1986); Carl A. Trocki, Opium and Empire: Chinese Society in Colonial Singapore, 1800–1910 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985); James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976). 7. Breckenridge and van der Veer, Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, 14. 8. Homi K. Bhabha, the location of culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 4–6. Victor Turner, who introduced the idea of liminality, observed that liminal persons are “necessarily ambiguous” as they elude “a system of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space.” See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (New York: Aldine, 1969), 95. 9. Both Malaysia and Singapore comprise a multiracial polity based on racial/ cultural categories established under colonial rule, when the Straits Settlements were Indian presidencies. These divisions are maintained after independence through administrative and cultural practices and reiterated in political rhetoric. For example, in Malaysia citizenship entitlements are divided according to race, whereas in Singapore ethnic ratios in public housing policy are maintained through legislation. 10. Examples of anticolonial activity include the Sepoy Mutiny of 1915 and the role of the Indian national army during World War II. 11. See Nirmala PuruShotham, “Disciplining Difference: Race in Singapore,” in Joel S. Kahn, ed., Southeast Asian Identities: Culture and Politics of Representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, 82 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998). 12. Bhabha, the location of culture. 13. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), introduction. 14. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Guha and Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies, 45–86; Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Ranajit Guha, A Subaltern Studies Reader 1986–1995 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

notes to pages 3–5

251

15. Marx’s analysis of colonial rule in India was based on the creation of an industrialized working class. See Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” New York Daily Tribune, 8 August 1853 (from digital archive: Works of Karl Marx, http:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm (accessed 31 January 2008). 16. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968). 17. Goh, Contours of Culture, 16. 18. Saskia Sassen, “Analytic Borderlands: Race, Gender and Representation in the New City,” in Anthony King, ed., Re-presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis, 191 (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Goh, Contours of Culture, 16. 19. Julian Thomas, “Archaeologies of Place and Landscape,” in I. Hodder, ed., Archaeological Theory Today, 165–186 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). 20. Traditionally, empiricist archaeology looks at material traces in a defined area and art history looks at the objectification of nature in paintings of the landscape. 21. Thomas, “Archaeologies of Place and Landscape,” 181. 22. Peggy Teo, Brenda Yeoh, Ooi Giok Ling, and Karen P. Y. Lai, Changing Landscapes of Singapore (Singapore: McGraw Hill Education (Asia), 2004). Teo et al. attribute the broadening of the term to geographers Sauer and Meinig, and they expand on Duncan’s ideas of the landscape as text. See C. Sauer, “The Morphology of the Landscape,” in J. Agnew, D. N. Livingston, and A. Rogers, eds., Human Geography: An Essential Anthology, 269–395 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, [1925] 1969); D. W. Meinig, “Symbolic Landscapes,” in D. W. Meinig, ed., The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays, 164–192 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); J. S. Duncan, The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretations in the Kandyan Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 23. See Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). See also Kim Dovey, “Dialectics of Place: Authenticity, Identity, Difference,” in De-Placing Difference: Architecture, Culture and Imaginative Geography, CAMEA, 3rd Symposium, Adelaide: The University of Adelaide, 2002, 45–52. 24. Gulsum Baydar Nalbantoglu and Wong Chong Thai, eds., Postcolonial Space(s) (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997). 25. Abidin Kusno, Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia (London: Routledge, 2000). 26. Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, and Wei-Wei Yeo eds., Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes (London: Routledge, 2003); and Robbie B. H. Goh and Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Theorizing the Southeast Asian City as Text: Urban

252

notes to pages 5–6

Landscapes, Cultural Documents, and Interpretative Experiences (Singapore: World Scientific, 2003). 27. Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London: Routledge, 1996). 28. Jane Jacobs and Ruth Fincher, eds., Cities of Difference (New York: Guilford Press, 1998). 29. Ibid., 8. 30. J. S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (New York: New York University Press, 1956), 304. The term “tropical” in Marx’s writings on slavery and early writings on colonialism was associated with systems of compulsion. See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, The Process of Capitalist Production, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Co. 1906; orig. pub. 1867), part III, x, 58. 31. David H. Kaplan and Steven R. Holloway, Segregation in Cities (Washington D.C.: Association of American Geographers, 1998), 29. 32. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; orig. pub. London, 1845), uses the idea of a divided city in relation to industrialization. Colonial examples are discussed in the work of Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1965), and in the chapters that follow. 33. Kaplan and Holloway, Segregation in Cities, 50, citing A. H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 201. 34. See Dell Upton, “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth Century Virginia,” in Robert Blair St. George, ed., Material Life in America, 1600–1860, 357–369 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988). 35. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 39; Janet Abu Lughod, “Tale of Two Cities: The Origins of Modern Cairo,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 7, no. 4 (1965): 429–457. 36. See discussion in Anthony D. King, “Writing Colonial Space: A Review Article,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 3 (July 1995): 541–554; see also Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power, and Environment (London and Boston: Routledge & Paul, 1976); Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002); Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989); Norma Evenson, The Indian Metropolis: A View Toward the West (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989). 37. See Anthony D. King, “The Language of Colonial Urbanization,” Sociology 8, no. 1 (1974): 81–110; King, Colonial Urban Development.

notes to pages 7–9

253

38. See Nezar Al Sayyad, “Urbanism and the Dominance Equation,” in Nezar Al Sayyad, ed., Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise, 1–26 (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992); Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers Under French Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1996). 39. Vikramaditya Prakash and Peter Scriver, Colonial Modernities: Building Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon (London: Routledge, 2007). 40. See Jyoti Hosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2005); and Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (London: Routledge, 2005; paperback ed. 2006); see also Sandip Hazareesingh, The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity: Urban Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay City 1900–1925 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007); Nihal Perera, “Indigenising the Colonial City: Late 19th-century Colombo and its Landscape,” Urban Studies 39, no. 9 (1 August 2002): 1703–1721. 41. Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, 76. 42. William J. Glover, Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Jim Masselos, The City in Action: Bombay Struggles for Power (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007). 43. See Anthony D. King, “Writing Colonial Space” and “Rethinking Colonialism: An Epilogue,” in Al Sayyad, Forms of Dominance, 343, for earlier and later reflections on this approach. 44. Robert W. Hefner, ed., The Politics of Multiculturalism: Pluralism and Citizenship in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2001), 16. 45. Ibid., 5. See J. S. Furnivall, Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy (New York, Macmillan, 1944; orig. pub. 1939); and Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, chap. 11, 303–307. 46. Judith Nagata, ed., Pluralism in Malaysia: Myth and Reality, A Symposium on Singapore and Malaysia (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), 1. 47. Ibid., 3–6. 48. Ibid., 11. These divisions persist, although new parties with religious, classbased, and political ideologies have emerged in the last few decades. 49. Ibid., 10. 50. Chua Beng Huat, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore (London: Routledge, 1995), 109. 51. Nagata, Pluralism in Malaysia, 13–14. 52. Hefner, The Politics of Multiculturalism, 19. 53. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, 303–306.

254

notes to pages 10–14

54. Hefner, The Politics of Multiculturalism, 19. 55. Khoo Kay Kim, “Malaysia: Immigration and the Growth of a Plural Society,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JMBRAS) LXXI (1998): 24. 56. Chua Beng Huat and Kwok Kian Woon, “Social Pluralism in Singapore,” in Hefner, The Politics of Multiculturalism, chap. 3, 88. 57. Chua Beng Huat and Norman Edwards, Public Space: Design, Use and Management (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1992); Carl A. Trocki, Singapore: Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control (Oxford: Routledge, 2006); Johannes Widodo, The Boat and the City (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Int., 2004); Hans-Dieter Evers and Rüdiger Korff, Southeast Asian Urbanism (Germany: Lit Verlag, 2000). 58. Eugene Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795–1895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Irschick examined the dialogic construction of a sedentary Tamil society in India by numerous social actors during the colonial period. 59. Goh, Contours of Culture. 60. Ibid., 7. 61. Bakhtin’s most creative period was in exile in Kazakhstan during the 1930s, when the Soviet Union was under Stalin’s government. See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 1. 62. Ibid., chap. 4, 263. 63. See Mireya Folch-Serra, “Place Voice Space: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dialogical Landscape,” Society and Space 8 (1990): 255–274. See page 265 for the characteristics of carnival. Dialogism is explained further in terms of heteroglossia (a heteroglot world), chronotope (matrices where time events and spatial elements are equally valid and correspond to each other), dialogical (all the discursive practices of a culture, relational thinking), polyphony (the mastery of a variety of social dialects), in ibid., 256, 258–262. 64. Rob Shields, “A Guide to Urban Representation and What to Do About It: Alternative Traditions of Urban Theory,” in Anthony D. King ed., Re-presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis, chap. 11, 239 (New York: New York University Press, 1996). In Shields’ view Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope captures the temporal and spatial possibilities of everyday communication outside officialdom. In Bakhtin’s analysis of speech, “forms of the carnivalesque are linked to specific sites such as the market-square, theatre and fair ground.” Ibid., 240. 65. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, 306. 66. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 15–17. 67. Ibid. 68. Shields, “A Guide to Urban Representation,” 239–240. 69. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 200. Foucault describes Jeremy Bentham’s

notes to pages 14–17

255

panopticon as having at the periphery an annular building lined with cells and at the center a tower from which the supervisor could see into each and every cell. 70. Patricia O’Brien, “Crime and Punishment as Historical Problem,” Journal of Society and History 11 (1977–1978): 513. Foucault reinterpreted state repression as a more pervasive system of power where disciplinary technologies were used to identify deviance and establish systems of normalization. The citizen or subject of the modern state, once he or she identified with the state apparatus, would internalize surveillance by a system of self-censorship. 71. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965), 46. 72. Norman Johnston, The Human Cage: A Brief History of Prison Architecture (New York: Walker and Co., 1973), 17. 73. Ibid., 34. Cellular jails were introduced to India from 1846 to 1868 at Agra jail (1849) and Salem Gaol in the Madras presidency; however, these were failures and the government abandoned the idea of single cells for Indian prisoners in 1868. See David Arnold, “India: The Contested Prison,” in Frank Dikötter and Ian Brown, eds., Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Asia, Africa and Latin America, 159–161 (London: Hurst & Co. Ltd, 2007) (hereafter cited in text as CoC). 74. David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little Brown, 1971). 75. The Utilitarianists proposed reforming the increasing number of criminals through labor, segregation, and constant surveillance. Work routines in the panopticon prison were organized in ways similar to the factory system, with repetitive, detailed (and unproductive) labor. 76. Slavery was abolished by a parliamentary act in the United Kingdom in 1833. 77. Michael Ignatief, “State, Civil Society, and Total Institutions: A Critique of Recent Social Histories of Punishment,” Crime and Justice 3 (1981): 153, 156 (reprinted in Social Control and the State, ed. S. Cohen and A. Scull, 75–76 [Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983]). 78. John Howard was the proponent of the Penitentiary Act of 1779, while Elizabeth Fry, who had Quaker/Evangelical interests, was a key figure in the Prison Disciplinary Society of 1817. 79. Michael Ignatief, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 80. See Negley K. Teeters and John D. Shearer, The Prison at Philadelphia Cherry Hill: The Separate System of Penal Discipline 1829–1913 (New York: Columbia University Press for Temple University Publications, 1957); Miles Ogborn, “Discipline, Government and Law: Separate Confinement in the Prisons of England and Wales, 1830–1877,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 20, no. 3 (1995): 295–311. See also, Johnston, The Human Cage, for building plans. The “Fresnes” or “telephone

256

notes to pages 18–19

pole” model described by Johnson on pages 42 through 48 was never evident in the Straits. Examples of the separate system were found at Cherry Hill, Philadelphia, and Pentonville, London, and of the system of silent association in the Auburn, New York State, and Portland, Dartford, prisons. 81. Although the presence of large numbers of Irish prisoners needs to be acknowledged, conflicts were based on cultural practices and loyalties rather than racial/ biological differences. 82. Stephen Nicholas and Peter R. Shergold, “Transportation as Global Migration,” in Stephen Nicholas, ed., Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past, chap. 3, 31 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 83. Ibid. 84. Stephen Nicholas and Peter R. Shergold, “Unshackling the Past,” in Stephen Nicholas, ed., Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past, chap. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). The writers challenge the work of Manning Clark, Robert Hughes, and J. Hirst, who argued that convicts were a criminal class. 85. Ibid., see 6–12. 86. Ricardo D. Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre, eds., The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Essays on Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control, 1830–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 4; Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille, A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Peter Zinoman, “The History of the Modern Prison and the Case of Indochina,” in Vicente Rafael, Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines and Colonial Vietnam, 152–174 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Peter Zinoman, “Colonial Prisons and Anti Colonial Resistance in French Indochina: The Thai Nguyen Rebellion 1917,” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 1 (2000): 57–98; Frank Dikötter, Crime, Punishment and the Prison in Modern China (London: Hurst & Co., 2002); David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and David Arnold, “The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge and Penology in 19th Century India,” in Ranajit Guha, A Subaltern Studies Reader 1986–1995, 140–178 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 87. Dikötter, Crime, Punishment and the Prison in Modern China, 25. 88. Clare Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815–53 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Satadru Sen, Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2; Anand Yang, ed., Crime and Criminality in British India, Association for Asian Studies Monograph, number 42 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985); Anand Yang, “Disciplining ‘Natives’: Prisons and Prisoners in Early Nineteenth Century India,” South Asia, Journal of South Asian Studies (December 1987): 29–45; Anand Yang, “Con(vict) Tales from Bengkulen: Convict/Laborer/Slave

notes to pages 19–22

257

in Early Nineteenth Century South and Southeast Asia,” unpublished paper at conference, Colonial Places, Convict Spaces: Penal Transportation in Global Context, c.1600–1940 (University of Leicester, December 1999). 89. Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies, Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia (Oxford: Berg, 2004). 90. Michael Salman, “Nothing without Labor: Penology, Discipline and Independence in the Philippines under the United States Rule,” in Vincent Rafael, ed., Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures, 119 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). 91. Michael Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767–1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). 92. CoC. 93. Ibid., 6–9. 94. Greg Bankoff, Crime, Society and the State in the Nineteenth Century Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000; orig. pub. 1996); Walter E. J. Tips, Crime and Punishment in King Chulalongkorn’s Kingdom: The Special Commission for the Reorganization of the Provincial Courts in Ayuthia (1896–1897) (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 1998); Vicente Rafael, Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines and Colonial Vietnam (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1999). 95. Michael Dutton, Policing Chinese Politics: A History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005). 96. Anthony Gorman, “Regulation, Reform and Resistance in the Middle Eastern Prison,” in CoC, chap. 4, 121. 97. Florence Bernault, “The Shadow of Rule: Colonial Power and Modern Punishment in Africa,” in CoC, chap. 3, 69–70. 98. These arguments are found in the following sources, respectively: Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (New York: Knopf, 1987); Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1899); John Bradley Hirst, Convict Society and its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales (Sydney: G. Allen & Unwin, 1983); Nicholas, ed., Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past; Stephen Nicholas and Peter R. Shergold, “Transportation as Global Migration,” in Nicholas, ed., Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past; Deborah Oxley, Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 99. John Braithwaite, “Crime in a Convict Republic,” The Modern Law Review 64, no. 1 (January 2001): 27. 100. James Broadbent and Joy Hughes, Francis Greenway Architect (Glebe, N.S.W.: Historic Houses Trust, 1997). Greenway’s designs included the layout of Sydney and many of its public buildings such as the general hospital, design for Government House, and the Hyde Park barracks, where the convicts were imprisoned.

258

notes to pages 22–23

101. See James Semple Kerr, Out of Sight Out of Mind: Australia’s Places of Confinement, 1788–1988 (Sydney: S. H. Ervin Gallery, National Trust of Australia, 1988); and Eleanor Conlin Cassella, Archaeology of the Ross Female Factory (Launceston: Records of the Queen Victoria Museum, no. 108, 2002). 102. Other familiar examples include Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (New York: New American Library, 1963), and the movie For the Term of His Natural Life, directed by Robert Stuart (Minton Productions, Australia, 1985). 103. Thomas Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types (London: Routledge, 1993); Norman Johnston, Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 104. See William Logan, “Hoa Lo: A Vietnamese Approach to Conserving Places of Pain and Injustice,” Historic Environment 17, no. 1 (2003): 27–31; and William Logan, “Hoa Lo, Vietnam’s Hanoi Hilton,” in William Logan and Keir Reeves, eds., Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with Difficult Heritage, chap. 15 (London: Routledge, forthcoming). 105. William Logan, “Hoa Lo: A Vietnamese Approach to Conserving Places of Pain and Injustice,” paper presented to the “Islands of Vanishment” Conference, Port Arthur Historic Site Management Committee in conjunction with the University of Tasmania, the Tasman Institute of Conservation and Convict Studies, and Australia ICOMOS (Port Arthur, Tasmania, 7–10 June 2002). 106. See “Pudu Jail Museum Is a Family Crowd Puller,” New Straits Times, 23 December 1997; and “UDA to Develop Pudu Prison,” The Star, 22 October 2007, describing proposals to redevelop Pudu Jail as a commercial cum residential complex. Olivia Chua notes that Pearl’s Hill prison replaced Bras Basah Jail in 1882 and was demolished in 1968. See Olivia Chua, “From Bras Basah to Changi, A History of Prisons in Pre-war Singapore” (academic exercise, Department of History, National University of Singapore, 1990), 4. 107. Major J. F. A. McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders (London: Archibald Constable and Co., 1899), assisted by W. D. Bayliss (hereafter cited as PTOW). 108. Kernial Singh Sandhu, “Tamil and other Convicts in the Straits Settlements: AD 1790–1873,” in Proceedings of the First International Conference of Tamil Studies (Kuala Lampur, 1966), 197–207; and C. M. Turnbull, “Convicts in the Straits Settlements, 1826–1867,” JMBRAS XLIII, pt. 1 (1970): 87–103. See also the mention of this subject in A. Mani, “Indians in Singapore Society,” in K. S. Sandhu and A. Mani, eds., Indian Communities in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1993), 788–809. 109. See K. G. Tregonning, ed., Papers on Malayan History (Singapore: Journal of Southeast Asian History, 1962); J. Norman Parmer, Colonial Labour Policy and Administration: A History of Labour in the Rubber Plantation Industry in Malaya, c. 1910–1941 (Gluckstadt: J. J. Augustin, 1960). 110. Clare Anderson, “The Politics of Convict Space: Penal Settlements in Southeast Asia,” in Alison Bashford and Carolyn Strange, eds., Isolation: Places and Prac-

notes to pages 23–30

259

tices of Exclusion, 40–55 (London: Routledge, 2002); and Clare Anderson, “Sepoys, Servants and Settlers: Convict Transportation in the Indian Ocean, 1787–1945,” in CoC, 185­–220; Anand Yang, “Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of World History 14, no. 2 (2003): 179–208. 111. Samuel S. Dhoraisingam, Peranakan Indians of Singapore and Melaka: Indian Babas and Nonyas–Chitty Melaka (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006), xii. 112. See Samuel S. Dhoraisingam, Singapore’s Heritage: Through Places of Historical Interest (Singapore: Elixir Consultancy Service, 1991), 63. 113. Elangovan, “Transportation” (theatrical performance), 18–19 August, at the Substation, reviewed in “Prison Break,” Time Out, Singapore, Issue 6, http://www .timeout.com/sg/en/performance/feature/prison-break (accessed 21 August 2007), information courtesy Lai Chee Kien. 114. Saw Chu-thong, “Transported Indian Convicts in Singapore, 1825–1873” (University of Malaya, unpublished, 1956); Chua, “From Bras Basah to Changi.” 115. Singapore Prison Service, http://www.prisons.gov.sg/changi_prison _complex.html (accessed 23 October 2007). 116. Gretchen Liu, In Granite and Chunam: The National Monuments of Singapore (Singapore: Landmark Books, 1996); Gretchen Liu, Singapore: A Pictorial History, 1819– 2000 (Singapore: National Heritage Board, 1999); Khoo Salma Nasution and Malcolm Wade, Penang Postcards Collection: 1899–1930s (Penang: Janus Print & Resources, 2003). 117. This history predates Singai Varthagamani and Thangai Nesan (mentioned in 1876, 1878), Jawi Peranakan (1876), Bintang Timor (1894), and the Lat Pau (1881). 118. Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, Cambridge Imperial and PostColonial Studies Series, 2007). 119. The ticket of leave (TOL) system allowed convicts who had proved themselves on good behavior to enter a probationary class which allowed them to work privately for part of the day for remuneration. 120. Yang, “Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia.” 121. Roland Braddell, The Lights of Singapore (London: Methuen and Company, 1947), 43–45, cited in Lai Chee Kien, “Commercial Interests and Multicultural Enclaves: The Establishment of Early Colonial Landscapes in Penang and Singapore” (unpublished, 2002), 1. 122. Ibid. Chapter 2: Divided Landscapes

1. H. W. Firmstone, Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JSBRAS) 42 (1905): 68. Lau Kha-Khu-Keng-Khau is Hokkien while Kau Ka-Ku Hau is a Cantonese adaptation of the Hokkien term.

260

notes to pages 30–34

2. A. W. Hamilton, “Hindustani, Tamil, Sanskrit and Other Loan Words in Malay,” JSBRAS 80 (1919): 32, 33, and 36. 3. The Indians in the Straits are typically identified as Chulias after the southern Chola kingdom in Tamil Nadu and Klings after the Kalinga kingdom centered in the region of Orissa. Due to the geographic extent of these kingdoms it is difficult to identify particular ethnic groups geographically within the Indian diaspora. Tamils were first identified as a category in the 1887–1888 Blue Book Report on the Straits Settlements. 4. Yang, in “Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia,” 180, estimates the numbers transported to the Straits at close to fifteen thousand. Yang’s figures are from 1790–1860 and are based on the estimates of Nicholas and Shergold, “Transportation as Global Migration,” 30, but it is very probable that these figures were exceeded, particularly if convict numbers arriving in each settlement annually averaged around 180 for Singapore and Penang. Anderson, in “Sepoys, Servants and Settlers,” in CoC, 185­–220, estimates a total of twenty thousand convicts. 5. The National Museum’s excavations at Fort Canning are recorded in Alexandra Avieropoulou Choo, Report on the Excavation at Fort Canning Hill (Singapore: Singapore National Museum, 1986); and in John N. Miksic and Cheryl-Ann Low Mei Gek, eds. Early Singapore: 1300s–1819 (Singapore: Singapore History Museum, 2004) (hereafter ES). 6. Attap roofing is made from woven palm leaves from the attap palm (nipah ruticans). 7. McNair, PTOW, 174. The government bricks were 9 x 4½ x 2¾ inches whereas Chinese-made bricks were 10 x 5 x 1½ inches. One cubic foot of brickwork with government bricks took thirteen bricks whereas twenty-two Chinese-made bricks were needed for the same length. 8. Bukit Larangan, the Forbidden Hill, was subsequently named Fort Canning Hill. 9. This was not the case in all colonies. In Egypt and Algeria, for example, penal labor was not used for industrialization. See Gorman, “Regulation, Reform and Resistance,” in CoC, 122. 10. The distribution of races in 2000 was as follows: Chinese 76.8 percent; Malay 13.9 percent; Indian 7.9 percent; Other 1.4 percent. Singapore Dept of Statistics, May 2001, 1–2, http://www.singstat.gov.sg/keystats/c2000/handbook.pdf (accessed 11 November 2002). 11. Raffles was in Singapore for short periods in 1819 and in 1822–1823 (six months). He left Singapore in 1823 and Benkulen in 1824. He died in England in 1826. 12. Kwa Chong Guan, “From Temasek to Singapore: Locating a Global City-State in the Cycles of Melaka Straits History,” in ES, 138. 13. Porch Frieze, Singapore Supreme Court, designed by Paskoe’s Ltd. and modeled by the firm of W. W. Wagstaff & Sons. Source: Y. C. Wong. 14. Kwa, “From Temasek to Singapore,” in ES, 256.

notes to pages 34–36

261

15. Cheryl-Ann Low, “Singapore from the 14th to the 19th Century,” in ES, chap. 1, 15. 16. John N. Miksic, “14th-Century Singapore: A Port of Trade,” in ES, chap. 2, 43–44. 17. Malcolm H. Murfett, John N. Miksic, Brian P. Farrell, and Chiang Ming Shun, Between Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore from First Settlement to Final British Withdrawal (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic, 2005), 17. 18. Low, “Singapore from the 14th to the 19th Century,” in ES, chap. 1, 37. 19. Ibid. See also Roland Bradell, “Lung-Ya-Men and Tan-Ma-His,” in Mubin Sheppard, ed., Singapore 150 Years (Singapore: Malaysian branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (MBRAS), Times Books International 1984; orig. pub. MBRAS XLII, pt.1, 1969), 16–28, for a far more comprehensive discussion. 20. Murfett et al., Between Two Oceans, 60–61. 21. Kwa, “From Temasek to Singapore,” in ES, 124–125. 22. Ibid. 23. Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, The Hikayat Abdullah, trans. A. H. Hill, JMBRAS 28, pt. 3 (June 1955): 147. 24. K. G. Tregonning, “The Historical Background,” in Ooi Jin Bee and Chiang Hai Ding, eds. Modern Singapore, chap. 2, 14 (Singapore: University of Singapore, 1969); C. M. Turnbull, The Straits Settlements 1826–67: Indian Presidency to Crown Colony (London: Athlone Press, 1972), 7. 25. The East India Company (founded by Queen Elizabeth I in 1599) was given the monopoly of the east-west trade and acted both as a government and a trading company in regard to the colonies. It remained independent until 1784 when a board of control was established by the British government to oversee the company. The government of India remained in a joint undertaking until 1813 when the sovereignty of the crown was extended over the company and it lost its trade monopoly. See Maurice Collis, Raffles (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 12. Following the British victories over the French at the battles of Trafalgar (1805) and Waterloo (1815) and because Holland was a republic dependent on France (under the treaty of 1806), the Dutch were compelled to make a treaty with the British and recognize their influence in the region. 26. See Turnbull, The Straits Settlements, 1. 27. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Collier, 1902; orig. pub. 1776). 28. Turnbull, The Straits Settlements, 1. In his “theory of moral sentiments,” Smith argued that societies tended to subconsciously seek an order or moral value system for proper social conduct. See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1817; orig. pub. 1759). 29. For example, when Lord Torrington was dispatched to Ceylon as governor with instructions to introduce a series of taxes, Lord John Russel suggested that he read

262

notes to pages 36–39

Adam Smith during his voyage there. See W. P. Morrel, British Colonial Policy in the Age of Peel and Russell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 528–532. 30. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, 304–305. 31. Nirmala PuruShotam, Negotiating Multiculturalism: Disciplining Difference in Singapore (Berlin: Muton de Gruyter, 2000), 31, in reference to Nirmala PuruShotham, Disciplining Differences: Race in Singapore (National University of Singapore, Department of Sociology Working Papers, 1995, no. 126). 32. Report on the Administration of the Straits Settlements (Blue Book for 1855– 1856), 83. Interestingly, the Indians were also described here as being litigious. See also Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (London: F. Cass, 1977). 33. E. Kay Gillis, Singapore Civil Society and British Power (Singapore: Talisman Publishing, 2005), 22. 34. Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia, 2nd ed. (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001), 181. 35. Ibid., 178. 36. Turnbull, The Straits Settlements, 36. 37. PRO CO 273/12, 10473: Governor’s House to Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, Colonial Office, Singapore, Straits Settlements (hereafter cited as SS), 16 September 1867, regarding the naturalization of aliens. The case discussed is of Al-Junied. 38. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1999). Ong uses this term to describe the plural system in contemporary Malaysia. 39. R. B. Krishnan, Indians in Malaya: A Pageant of Greater India (Singapore: The Malayan Publishers, 1936), 32–33. 40. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 184. 41. Ibid., 44. 42. Barbara Watson Andaya, Perak, the Abode of Grace: A Study of An EighteenthCentury Malay State, East Asian Historical Monographs (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press 1979); Carl Trocki, Prince of Pirates: The Temenggongs and the Development of Johor and Singapore, 1784–1885 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1978). 43. Trocki, Opium and Empire, 25. For a detailed discussion of this system including a map of the chukangs, see Lai Chee Kien, “Commercial Interests and Multicultural Enclaves.” 44. Johannes Widodo, The Boat and the City (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Int., 2004). Widodo also traces this pattern in Semarang and Batavia. 45. Stephen Dobbs, The Singapore River: A Social History, 1819–2002 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003).

notes to pages 39–43

263

46. Donald and Joanna Moore, The First Hundred and Fifty Years of Singapore (Donald Moore Press Ltd., 1969, in association with the Singapore Chamber of Commerce), 81. 47. Dobbs, The Singapore River, 8. 48. Ibid., 39. 49. Ibid. 50. Andaya and Andaya, A History of Malaysia, 44–45. 51. Ibid. 52. T. G. McGee, The Southeast Asian City: A Social Geography of the Primate Cities of Southeast Asia (New York: Fredrick A. Praeger, 1967), 41. 53. Dhoraisingam, Peranakan Indians of Singapore and Melaka, 4. 54. Ibid. 55. In 1826 the settlement of Malacca had 31,000 inhabitants and two-thirds of them were Malays, who were concentrated in the rural areas. Melaka town had a population of twelve thousand, of which four to five thousand were Chinese, more than three thousand were Malays, and about two thousand were southern Indians. Turnbull, The Straits Settlements, 16 (from P. J. Begbie, The Malayan Peninsula [Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1967, orig. pub. 1834], 366–367). 56. In Abdullah, The Hikayat, 340, A. H. Hill shows a map of the town of Melaka in 1800 AD. 57. Koh Lay Huan came from Kuala Muda, Kedah, bringing five hundred men, women, and children to settle in Penang. He was said to have established a trading street on the island and presented Light with a fishing net when he arrived in 1786. He was said to have been an educated Chinese who rebelled against the Manchu government and so could not return to China. See Khoo Su Nin, Streets of George Town Penang (Malaysia: Janus Print and Resources, 1993), 64. 58. Ibid., 17. See F. G. Stevens, “A Contribution to the Early History of Prince of Wales Island,” JMBRAS VII, pt. III (October 1929): 377– 414. 59. L. F. Comber, Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya: A Survey of the Triad Society from 1800 to 1900 (Locust Valley, N.Y.: J. J. Augustin, 1959), 35. 60. Khoo Kay Kim, “Malaysia: Immigration and the Growth of a Plural Society.” 61. See Sheppard, ed., Singapore 150 Years, for several essays on early Singapore. They include an essay by C. A. Gibson Hill on “The Orang Laut of Singapore River and the Sampang Panjang,” 121. He names at least three groups: Orang Biduanda Kallang, Orang Seletar, and a group in Telok Blanga. The description is attributed to an Orang Laut man, Wa Hakim. 62. 500 Spanish (Mexican) dollars = 125 pounds sterling = 625 rupees at the sterling rate for 1830–1845. T. H. H. Hancock, Coleman’s Singapore (Kuala Lampur: MBRAS, 1986, in association with Pelanduk Publications), 37. 63. W. Bartley, “The Population of Singapore in 1819,” in Sheppard, Singapore 150 Years, 117.

264

notes to pages 43–46

64. Hancock, Coleman’s Singapore, 31. The building was described as “a neat bungalow” and comprising “two parallel halls with front and back verandahs, terminated by two square wings to provide sleeping apartments.” 65. Hancock, Coleman’s Singapore, 14. The dimensions are given by Raffles in a letter to the Duchess of Somerset. See Capt. H. F. Pearson, “Singapore from the Sea, June 1823,” in Sheppard, Singapore 150 Years, 143. 66. Abdullah, The Hikayat, 148. Abdullah regrets not buying land because of the high prices, and it is clear that this is a strategy to ensure both the class of residents and the type of buildings in the town area. 67. Stamford Raffles gave detailed instructions regarding the layout of the town. Moore and Moore, The First Hundred and Fifty Years of Singapore, 81–87. 68. Abdullah, The Hikayat, 126, 129, and 155. A. H. Hill describes the Orang Laut as sea gypsies. According to Abdullah, Kampung Gelam gets its name from the Gelam tree, the bark of which was used for making awnings and sails. 69. Ibid., 155. 70. Ibid., 154–156. 71. Ibid., 142. 72. Murfett et al., Between Two Oceans, 71. 73. Ibid., 72. 74. Abdullah, The Hikayat, 196. 75. In late nineteenth-century urban planning, particularly in French colonial examples, geographical features such as parks and rivers would be used as a cordon sanitaire (quarantine line) and rationalized as a hygienic measure. Spiro Kostof, The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Form Through History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 112. 76. Yeoh, Contesting Space, 244. Yeoh describes how the shift from cellular, selfcontained worlds of eighteenth-century England were gradually broken down during the course of the nineteenth century, producing a new industrial order with “socially neutral” and rigidly defined public spaces. 77. Stevens, “A Contribution to the Early History of Prince of Wales Island,” 378– 382. 78. Penang Past and Present, 1786-1963 (City Council of George Town, 1966), 14–19. 79. Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Breckenridge and van der Veer, Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, chap. 10, 324–325. 80. H. F. Pearson, “Lt. Jackson’s Plan of Singapore,” in Sheppard, Singapore 150 Years, 150–154; Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 140–141, describes how the grid was originally used for this purpose in the Greek colonies. 81. Coleman shows “surih” gardens in his survey plan. Sireh in Malay may refer either to betel leaf or pepper plantations, since the leaf in both creepers is similar.

notes to pages 46–52

265

82. Cameron describes the godowns as brick and plaster buildings with colonnades in front and deep eaves. John Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions in Malayan India (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford in Asia, 1965; orig. pub. 1865), 52. 83. NL 5556, Straits Times, 3 July 1855. 84. PRO CO 273/44, 2959/71 (no. 197), 548: Report on the Civil Establishments of the SS, McNair to Colonial Secretary, 1 January 1871. 85. PRO CO 273/16, 118: Minute of the Governor General, 7 November 1859. 86. According to Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, 140, fourteen thousand Chinese immigrants arrived in Singapore between 1863 and 1864, but probably nine thousand others returned to China; see also Turnbull, The Straits Settlements, 53. 87. Turnbull, The Straits Settlements, 106. 88. See McGee, The Southeast Asian City, 70, fig. 9. It is probable that Middle Road was intended to separate these two zones since no public institutions were located beyond it. 89. According to the Spanish Law of the Indies, 1573, Ordinance 112. See Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 124. 90. Others include Wajid Khan and A. Annamalai. 91. Jane Beamish and Jane Ferguson, A History of Singapore Architecture (Singapore: Graham Brash, Pte. Ltd., 1985), chap. 3. 92. Goh, Contours of Culture, 38–39. 93. Ibid., 39. 94. Ibid. 95. The intention of the institution was to teach the sons of Malay chieftains, and in 1871 the king of Siam sent seventeen boys there. C. B. Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore (Singapore: Fraser and Neave Ltd., 1902), 137; Abdullah, The Hikayat, 158, 160. 96. Turnbull, The Straits Settlements, 34, describes how Hoo Ah Kay, known as Whampoa, would treat his European guests to dinner in Western fashion, with silver cutlery and English china. 97. Report on the Administration of the Straits Settlements, 1855–1856, 83. 98. Ibid. 99. Turnbull, The Straits Settlements, 22, gives the total population of Singapore in 1860, around the period when Cameron was traveling, as 80,792: Malays, 10,888; Chinese, 50,043; Indians, 12,971; Bugis, 906; Europeans 466 (from Singapore Free Press, 3 January 1861). 100. Yeoh, Contesting Space, 246. 101. Ibid. 102. Moore and Moore, The First Hundred and Fifty Years of Singapore, 86, gives an account of Raffles’ town planning regulations of 1822. The Spanish (Mexican)

266

notes to pages 52–54

silver dollar remained the main unit of currency in Singapore throughout the nineteenth century despite several attempts to replace it with the Indian rupee. Copper coins based on fractions of the dollar were introduced in 1846. However, several units of currency were in use simultaneously, with the colonial government in India attempting to enforce rupee circulation and the merchants resisting its imposition. A silver dollar was minted for the Straits Settlements in 1903. Turnbull, The Straits Settlements, 203–208; and Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, 595–601. 103. Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, 53, observed that many of the town lands “were in the nature of 99 and 999 years’ leases.” 104. Moore and Moore, The First Hundred and Fifty Years of Singapore, 86. 105. For a discussion of the role played by markets in colonial India, see Anand Yang, Bazaar India: Markets, Society and the Colonial State in Bihar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 106. Yang, Bazaar India, 159, 256. 107. Lee Kip Lin, Telok Ayer Market (Singapore: Archives and Oral History Department, 1983). 108. The dates correspond to permanent structures. 109. Malabaris are Malayaali-speaking populations from present-day Kerala in southwestern India. 110. Moore and Moore, The First Hundred and Fifty Years of Singapore, 85. 111. Chinese terms for secret societies and clan houses are courtesy of Lai Chee Kien. Shi Hoey Tang: private group or meeting, party; tong (popular word for hoey): hallway, as in ancestral hall; kongsi: organization built for commerce, community house, banking, poor relief, immigration. 112. Tao Por means “Great Town” in Hokkien and is named as such in comparison to Sae Por, “Little Town,” which developed adjacent to Kampung Gelam during the late nineteenth century. See Jon Lim, Transforming Traditions: Architecture in the ASEAN Countries, ASEAN Studies Publication Series (Singapore: The ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information, 2001), 165. 113. In March 1823, the sultan’s village of fifty-six acres was located in Kampung Gelam with the Bugis village next to it. The Temenggong’s village was originally at the mouth of the Singapore River and was later relocated to two hundred acres at Telok Belangah. See Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, 104. 114. Rajesh Rai, “Sepoys, Convicts and the ‘Bazaar’ Contingent: The Emergence and Exclusion of ‘Hindustani’ Pioneers at the Singapore Frontier,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35, no.1 (2004): 11–12. 115. According to the first census in 1824 there were 74 Europeans, 16 Armenians, 15 Arabs, 4,580 Malays, 3,317 Chinese, 756 natives of India, and 1,925 Bugis, making a total of 10,683. See McNair, PTOW, 38.

notes to pages 54–56

267

116. Although Lt. Jackson’s ideal plan of 1823–1824 indicates Rocher Square, G. D. Coleman’s map of 1836 does not show it. 117. McGee, The Southeast Asian City, 71. McGee is basing this comment on Donald Davies, More Old Singapore (Singapore: Donald Moore, 1956). For a description of European life, see Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, 287–303. 118. Lo Man Yuk, “Chinese Names of Streets in Penang,” JSBRAS 33 (1900): 227. 119. Dr. Oxley moved to the Claymore and Tanglin districts in 1837, William Cuppage opened up the Emerald Hill Estate, and others like Charles Cairnie on Cairnie’s Hill, Ker at Bukit Chermin, and Guthrie at Tanjong Aur followed. Several other merchants moved to the Tanglin area after the 1940s. See C. A. Gibson-Hill, Singapore Old Strait and New Harbour, 1300–1870 (Singapore: Memoirs of Raffles Museum, no. 3, Government Printing Press, December 1956), 83–84. 120. The Garden City Movement headed by Ebenezer Howard responded to this move. 121. King, Colonial Urban Development, 290. 122. Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, 74–79. 123. See Norman Edwards, The Singapore House and Residential Life 1819–1939 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Lee Kip Lin, The Singapore House 1819–1942 (Singapore: Times Edition for Preservation of Monuments Board, 1988). 124. Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, 77; See Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and A. D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995; orig. pub. 1984). 125. Gharry = light, horse-drawn carriage in India (from Hindi). 126. Straits Times, 12 June 1888, cited in Yeoh, Contesting Space, 170 fn 38. 127. The Khoo Kongsi in Cannon Street, Penang, is an example of this type of spatial occupation. 128. Yeoh, Contesting Space, 143–146. 129. Yeoh is writing about the 1880s. 130. Cuthbert Collingwood (1866–1867), “Malays, Indians and Chinese,” in John Bastin, comp., Travellers’ Singapore: An Anthology (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994), 102–108, 106. 131. In his journals, Major Low (1840–1841), a magistrate and officer of the Madras army, employed a butler, two underservants, a maid or Ayah or nurse, tailor, cook with an assistant, washer man, two grooms, grass cutter, lamplighter and sweeper, scavenger, and water man. Moore and Moore, The First Hundred and Fifty Years of Singapore, 199. 132. There were considerable numbers of farmers among the immigrants who had not experienced urban conditions, which is evident in the pursuit of certain rural professions such as market gardening among the Chinese and cattle herding, dairy farming, and carting among the Indians. See George Bennett (1833–1834), “A Visit to Sultan Husain,” 31–35, 33; and Alfred Russel Wallace (1854­–1862), “The Bukit Timah

268

notes to pages 56–58

Missionary,” 77–80, 79, both in John Bastin, comp., Travellers’ Singapore: An Anthology (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994). 133. Isabella Bird (1879), “Beautiful Indian Women,” 129–132, 129; Cuthbert Collingwood (1866–1867), “Malays, Indians and Chinese,” 102–108, 102; George Windsor Earl (1832–1834), “Singapore in the Early 1830s,” 23–30, 23; Dr. J. Berncastle (1849), “The Baneful Effects of Opium Smoking,” 67–70, 69, all in John Bastin, comp., Travellers’ Singapore: An Anthology (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994). 134. Yeoh, Contesting Space, describes how sanitation projects were used to justify urban regulation. 135. Trocki, Opium and Empire, 50–51. 136. Ibid., 223. 137. Ibid., 52. 138. The introduction of this policy to Singapore by William Farquhar met with objections from Stamford Raffles. On his return to the colony in 1822 Raffles fought the farm policy with increasing urban regulation. While Raffles was agitating for Farquhar’s dismissal, the policy grew to be the mainstay of the settlements. 139. PRO CO 273/3, 10–14: Political Department, 1 March 1859 (no. 7). The excise farms in the three settlements brought in Rs. 421,185 (rupees) from a total of Rs. 1,031,873 for 1855–1856. Total charges were Rs. 1,313,758 (including convict expenses). The money was used primarily to pay administrative salaries for the superintendent of police, the assistant resident, twelve constables, and a sergeant. In addition, a sum of Spanish $325 was paid to the sultan and the Temenggong for assisting in police duties. (Several currencies including Indian rupees and Spanish dollars were in circulation at the time with the merchants favoring the use of Spanish silver dollars.) 140. PRO CO 273/3, 9: Request that the settlement be withdrawn from the control of the Indian government, since the East India Co. no longer has trading privileges. Gambier is a juice from the leaves of a shrub, which is then boiled down to a syrup and dried in the sun. It is used for dyeing and tanning. See PRO CO 273/20, 83: 10 May 1868. 141. Among these, opium and gambling brought the largest revenues between 1820 and 1826, after which in 1827 the gambling farm was abolished on moral grounds. During that first seven-year period the revenues from opium had increased from $7,345 to $24,600, and revenue from the gambling farms had increased from $5,275 to $30,390 (Spanish silver dollars). Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, 143–144. 142. Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, 216–217. 143. Berncastle “The Baneful Effects of Opium Smoking,” in John Bastin, comp., Travellers’ Singapore: An Anthology (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994), 69. 144. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 279–281, for a discussion of illicit economies in French colonies.

notes to pages 58–60

269

145. Trocki, Opium and Empire, 68–69. 146. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 280. 147. Mak Lau Fong, The Sociology of Chinese Secret Societies: A Study of Chinese Secret Societies in Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1981). 148. Chen Kuo-wei, “Becoming Company: A Study of the Chinese Kongsi as ‘regime of labour’ dwelling on its spaces of representation in nineteenth century Penang,” thesis abstract (unpublished thesis, D85544003, Taiwan University, College of Engineering, 2005), http://www.cetd.com.tw/ec/thesisdetail.aspx?etdun=U0001-2207200523311100 (accessed on 31 January 2008, translated from Chinese). 149. Mak Lau Fong, The Sociology of Chinese Secret Societies, 4. 150. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 282, for a description of the role of the police in the modern state. 151. Moore and Moore, The First Hundred and Fifty Years of Singapore, 24. 152. Ibid., 46. parang = a cleaver; chungkul = long-handled spade (from Malay). 153. Abdullah, The Hikayat, 146. 154. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, 304. 155. Penang Past and Present, 4–5; John Bastin, The Journal of Thomas Otho Travers 1813–1820 (Singapore: A. G. Banfield, 1960), 171, 199. 156. Sandhu, “Tamil and Other Convicts in the Straits Settlements,” 199. 157. Moore and Moore, The First Hundred and Fifty Years of Singapore, 67. Judicial Dept: D. Hill, Secretary to the Govt. to Major Farquhar, Resident at Singapore, Fort St. George, 27 April 1821; requests for convicts can be found in IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial (1852, no. 22): Convict statements and reports, 29 November 1852; PRO CO 273/19: 4 June 1868; PRO CO 273/41, 1870: November and December. 158. McNair, PTOW, 39. 159. McNair, PTOW, 18 and 39. McNair also uses this phrase as the title of his book. The system was first introduced in Penang but failed. It was reintroduced in Singapore in 1825 by Governor Bonham with the first batch of transportees from Benkulen. 160. Kostof, The City Shaped, 117. This is also true of Melaka, where the streets perpendicular to the river housed wealthy proprietors and the cross streets often housed their dependents. 161. McNair, PTOW, 54. 162. “We would like to see the stream of black convicts turned in some other direction than towards the Straits, but Indian convicts may be accounted harmless when compared with what we may reasonable expect if European felons were located here.” “Protest of European Residents against Chinese and European Convicts,” NL 5556, 3 July 1855, Straits Times. Buckley, in An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, 657, observes that Governor Blundell describes the Indian convicts as “harmless settlers” in

270

notes to pages 60–64

1856; in page 482, he describes the fear of Chinese (Hong Kong) convicts and murders by convicts on board convict ships including the General Wood (1848), the Freak (1841), the Harriett Scott (1843), the Ariel (1844), and the Lowjee Family (1844). 163. See McNair, PTOW, 43, 67, 68, and 121. McNair describes the convict warders as functioning both as detectives and police (163). 164. See Diana Carroll, “Hikayat Abdullah: Discourse of Dissent,” JMBRAS LXXII, pt. 2 (1999): 92–129. 165. In 1824 Europeans numbered 74 (McNair, PTOW, 38), and in 1825, 800 to 900 convicts were retransportated from Benkulen. Forty years later in 1860, the European population was 466 (Turnbull, The Straits Settlements, 22) and the number of convicts in 1859 was 1,839 (PRO CO 273/3, 19: Political Dept, Lord Stanley to Gov. Gen. of India in Council, 1 March 1859 (no. 7)).

Chapter 3: The Colonial Prison

1. Anderson, “Sepoys, Servants and Settlers,” in CoC, 185 and 187. See also Anderson, “The Politics of Convict Space.” 2. Anderson, “The Politics of Convict Space,” 89. In reference to the convicts in the jail in 1857, McNair noted, “The men from India were Seikhs, Dogras, Pallis, or a shepherd race; Thugs and Dacoits from different parts of the Bengal presidency, and mostly from around Delhi and Agra; felons from all parts of Madras and Bombay presidencies and a few from Assam and Burmah, chiefly Dacoits, and a sprinkling of Cingalese.” 3. Foucault makes this comparison in Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 63. 4. Frank Dikötter, “Introduction,” in CoC, 3. 5. McNair, PTOW, 9. Kala pani is a Hindi word used by convicts to describe their journey. 6. Benkulen, Burma, Singapore, Penang, Melaka, Labuan, and the Andaman Islands were British penal colonies in Southeast Asia during the nineteenth century. 7. IOR F/4/2712, public narratives 4th quarter of 1855 (23 March 1857): Petition of Akbar Khan to E. A. Blundell, 8 September 1855 (written in Tamil). Akbar Khan was incarcerated in Jabalpur for two years, in Bengal sixteen years, in Arakan thirteen years, and in the Straits Settlements one year and eight months; Shaik Badoolad had been one and a half years in Amorah, eight months in Basbarrallah (?), eight years in Calcutta, fourteen years in Arakan, and one and a half years in the Straits. Meanwhile, Governor Blundell had been in Penang for twelve years, Tenasserim for ten years, and the Straits Settlements for sixteen years. Turnbull, The Straits Settlements, 63 fn 19. 8. In colonial documents of the period, the term “convicts” is used for convicted criminals who are fulfilling the terms of their sentence, while the term “prisoner” is used for those imprisoned and awaiting either sentencing or transportation. Typically,

notes to pages 64–68

271

these categories divide the transportees from the local prisoners. In later years this distinction has been applied incorrectly to differentiate between political and other internees. The term “transmarine” has also been used extensively in describing convicts transported from India to other countries. 9. See Anderson, “Sepoys, Servants and Settlers,” in CoC, chap. 6, 186; and Nicholas, Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past, 29, 33, 34. Anderson provides detailed studies of transportation to Mauritius in her books Convicts in the Indian Ocean and Legible Bodies, cited in chapter 1. 10. In 1811, when Lord Minto visited Melaka, he freed the government slaves as well as those presented to him by the sultan of Bali and kept the latter (five boys and two girls) on as servants. See Collis, Raffles, 38–40. 11. Anderson, “Sepoys, Servants and Settlers,” in CoC, chap. 6, 189; PRO CO 273/21, 12041 SS, 337: Chinese and Hong Kong convicts were sent to Labuan after 1849. 12. Anderson, Legible Bodies, 5. 13. Anderson, “Sepoys, Servants and Settlers,” in CoC, 189. 14. Arnold, “India: The Contested Prison,” in CoC, chap. 5, 153. 15. Anderson, “Sepoys, Servants and Settlers,” in CoC, 198. 16. Ibid., 207; Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, 213, 475. The employment of Chinese convicts on roads proved too risky because they could merge easily into the local population. 17. By the 1824 treaty Britain and Holland agreed on their “separate spheres of influence” in Southeast Asia, and Benkulen was acquired by the Dutch in exchange for Melaka. 18. The actual transportation of convicts ended by 1867 but they continued to exist as a penal category in the Singapore jail until 1873. 19. Walter Makepeace, Gilbert Brooke, and Roland Braddell, eds., One Hundred Years of Singapore, vol. 1, reprint (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991; orig. pub., London: John Murray, 1921), 284. 20. The phrase is from the title of McNair’s book Prisoners Their Own Warders (cited previously). 21. See Ian Brown, “Southeast Asia: Reform and the Colonial Prison,” in CoC, chap. 7, 229; and Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille, 37. 22. Partha Chatterjee, Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 8. 23. PRO CO 273/28, 30: McNair, Singapore, 28 February 1869. McNair describes the primary punishment for transportees as being the separation from relatives and friends “to whom from the peculiarity of their village life they are proverbially attached.” 24. NL 92, no. 514, 15 June 1867: Report on casualties on the ship Atlanta. Examples of transport ships from India to the Straits include Eliza, La Belle Alliance,

272

notes to pages 68–70

Gilmore, Drougan, Hastings, Dona Carmelita, Berwickshire, Marquis of Huntley, Atlanta, Daydream (based on the IOR Z/P series). 25. Smallpox, typhoid, diarrhea, and dysentery were typical. 26. Michel Foucault describes the lunatic facing this same great uncertainty as “the prisoner of passage in the midst of what is the free-est and openest of routes.” Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 11. 27. IOR P/143/19 (25 May 1848, no. 280): Governor of SS to A. R. Young, Undersecretary, Government of Bengal (according to Major Faber) 3 November 1847. 28. PRO CO 273/58, 155, Reports 313/49: Office of Inspector General Police, C. B. Plunket to the Colonial Secretary, Singapore, 10 June 1872. 29. Collis, Raffles, 37. Lord Minto, when he visited Malacca in 1811, had the dungeon blocked up and the instruments of torture destroyed; Penang Past and Present, appendix, 1803 Map; McNair, PTOW, 36. This is also described in Abdullah, The Hikayat, 150. Initially, an existing jail was reinforced for $900. It was located at the site later occupied by the courthouse. 30. PRO CO 273/3, 387: Hangman’s green was located in front of the old police office between Upper Cross Street and Masjid Street, 23 December 1859 (no. 593). 31. IOR P/136/66 (9/19 May 1825, no. 228): Presidents Minutes, R. Ibberton, 19 May 1825. 32. McNair, PTOW, 11, confirms murder, thuggee, and dacoity as typical crimes. 33. IOR V/22/409: Prisoners received by Bridgewater, 26 July 1865. 34. As evident in the roll these were the categories by which the sending government typically sorted the convicts. 35. McNair, PTOW, 54, “For one caste would invariably ‘split’ against another.” 36. Ibid., 89. 37. IOR V/22/409. 38. Anderson, Legible Bodies, 2. 39. Frank S. Marryat, Borneo and the Indian Archipelago, With Drawings, Costumes and Scenery (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848), 214. The term in fact may have referred to Dumka, an area in Bihar, and the prisoner could have been from the tribal populations of the area, typically used in India for road construction. According to Amita Satyal, the Dumka are deployed in road building for the Indian military even today. Private communication. 40. Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean, appendices B6, C2. 41. Anderson, Legible Bodies, 33. 42. Ibid., 79. 43. Ibid., 16. 44. McNair, PTOW, 88. 45. PRO CO 273/56, 158 (1872, no. 41): Comptroller of Convicts to Anson, 27 January 1872. Women would be punished instead with solitary confinement since the offi-

notes to pages 70–74

273

cers believed that “the deprivation of the use of the tongue which separate confinement entails is in itself to most women a severe lesson.” According to the same report the cutting of hair as a punishment was prohibited in Europe. See Arnold, “The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge and Penology in 19th Century India,” 162. 46. McNair, PTOW, 28. 47. Ibid., 17. 48. Ibid. 49. This prison was eventually abandoned due to poor ventilation and sanitary arrangements. 50. McNair, PTOW, 39. 51. Rai, “Sepoys, Convicts and the ‘Bazaar’ Contingent,” 11–12. 52. McNair, PTOW, plate x, opposite page 39. McNair has taken this image from the posthumous account of Raffles’ life by his widow, Lady Sophia Raffles. See Lady Sophia Raffles, Memoir of the life and public services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (London: John Murray, 1830). 53. See Anderson, “Sepoys, Servants and Settlers,” in CoC, 204; and Yang, “Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia.” 54. NL 169/27, 143: Resident to Dep. Resident Councilor, Singapore, 6 January 1832. 55. Anderson, “Sepoys, Servants and Settlers,” in CoC, 207. 56. Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille, 32. 57. McNair, PTOW, 21. McNair includes a footnote saying that James Young Simpson, in his Side Lights on Siberia, Some Account of the Great Siberian Railroad the Prisons and Exile System (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1898) uses “command” as denoting a jail outside the prison walls. 58. J. S. Furnivall, The Fashioning of Leviathan: The Beginnings of British Rule in Burma, ed. Gehan Wijeyewardene (Canberra: Published in association with the Economic History of Southeast Asia Project and the Thai-Yunnan Project, 1991), 41. 59. McNair, PTOW, 21–23. 60. NL 478, 25 March 1846, Straits Times. 61. Bernault, “The Shadow of Rule: Colonial Power and Modern Punishment in Africa,” in CoC, 75. 62. Ibid., 66. 63. Brown, “Southeast Asia: Reform and the Colonial Prison,” in CoC, 230. 64. Sen, Disciplining Punishment, 87. 65. IOR P/136/66 (9/19 May 1825, no. 228): President’s Minutes, 19 May 1825. They were based on modifications to the class system introduced in Benkulen. 66. Anderson, “Sepoys, Servants and Settlers,” in CoC, 195. 67. McNair, PTOW. 68. Ibid., 18. The system was removed from Penang in 1827 by a committee who drew up the Penang rules, and later reinstated. Singapore adopted this policy from the

274

notes to pages 74–76

inception of its penal system. The first convict establishment in Singapore was remunerated as follows per month: superintendent $150 (Lieutenant Chester), overseer $50, a native doctor $12, a writer $7, and one peon for every twenty-five convicts $6. See Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, 180. 69. IOR P/145/42 (1st quarter 1856): Classification of convicts PWI (Prince of Wales Island), 19 June 1856. 70. McNair, PTOW, 89. The prison officers included a superintendent, who was also the executive officer of the station, his assistant, a chief warder and two assistants, an overseer of artificers and of roads, whereas the native staff included three duffadars, eight first tindals, twenty-two second tindals, ninety-four peons, and sixty-five orderlies for an average of 1,900 prisoners. 71. IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial: Col. W. Butterworth, Governor PWI, Singapore and Melaka to J. P. Grant, Secretary to the govt. of India, Fort William, 23 August 1851. 72. IOR P/145/64 (1857, no. 72): The ship Diana arrives with two female convicts with children under two years of age, 26 June 1857. 73. IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial (1852, no. 22) item 21: The case of a twelve-year-old boy from Mysore, 29 November 1852. 74. Stephen Nicholas, “The Organization of Public Work,” in Nicholas, Convict Workers, chap. 10, 160. 75. Geoff Reynolds, Gaol Regulations 1867: For the Guidance of the Prison Staff in the Colony of New South Wales (Bateman’s Bay, N.S.W.: Possum Printing, 1993), 18. 76. Convicts if sentenced for life were admitted to the first class after sixteen years, if for seventeen years after twelve years, and if for seven years after six years. Women, whatever the period of sentence, were admitted to first class after three to five years. McNair, PTOW, 85. 77. IOR P/138/11 (3/25 January 1827): Court of Directors Orders 1796–1827. W. H. MacNaughton, Fort William to H. Shakespeare, Judicial Dept., January 1827. 78. The Australian hours were from 5:45 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. 79. McNair, PTOW, 92. 80. PRO CO 273/3, 737: Complaints against H. M. Jailor, Singapore, 24 January 1859; and PRO CO 273/5, 269, coll. 16 (1860, no. 2): Revised scale of rations, Singapore. 81. Ghee = butter from buffalo milk. 82. Firewood was supplied from the chips in the carpenter’s shop and old timber from construction works. 83. IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial (May 1850, no. 323): Report for Melaka. Each prisoner received two pairs of trousers and two jackets made of coarse, dark-colored cloth, and one jail suit made of strong long cloth. 84. Clare Anderson, “Fashioning Identities: Convict Dress in Colonial South and Southeast Asia,” History Workshop Journal 52 (2001): 153–174.

notes to pages 76–78

275

85. PRO CO 273/5, 242, 213: Prescribed clothing for convicts, Singapore, 28 February 1860. 86. See, McNair, PTOW, for photographs of various classes of prisoners in penal attire. Anderson, in chapter 4 of Legible Bodies, suggests that it was used in many ways for barter and for resistance as well as for regulating convicts. 87. PRO CO 273/5, 242; McNair, PTOW, 95. 88. PRO CO273/3, 845–846: W. J. Mitchell, Acting Superintendent Convicts, Penang, 22 April 1859. Any extraordinary possessions were confiscated when the prisoner first arrived at the jail and were retained in the police treasury until his or her release or promotion to first class. On the prisoner’s death the property could be claimed by relatives or else it reverted to the government. 89. There was a disturbance in the Alipur Gaol in 1834, during which the district magistrate was killed. See Arnold, “India: The Contested Prison,” in CoC, chap. 5, 152. 90. Ibid., 152, 156. 91. PRO CO273/3, 849: W. J. Mitchell, Penang, 26 April 1859, on the impossibility of surveillance of carters. 92. Doits = a small amount of currency, probably the equivalent of a few cents. 93. NL 478, Straits Times, 18 March 1846. “From 9 at night till 5 in the morning a series of tom toms have enlivened the precincts of the convict lines. . . . Convicts nerves must be of the same material as their chains, if after hard labor all day they can sustain these nightly florics . . . the sum of two doits is levied for admission to the nocturnal revels!” 94. See PRO CO273/3, 857: The Municipal Commissioner, Province Wellesley, March 1859 (no. 5); NL 478, Straits Times, 25 March 1846. “At Singapore, transported felons dress themselves in what attire pleases them, or the best their means enable them to obtain”; NL, 478, Straits Times, 25 March 1846. “[T]he convicts not only look well fed but keep a great number of dogs (we have counted 18 saucy curs) to get rid of surplus food . . . we have noticed a goat and two kids follow a gang of convicts to their wonted routine (labor we can hardly call it) and return to the convict lines in the afternoon.” 95. Ian Brown, “Southeast Asia: Reform and the Colonial Prison,” in CoC, chap. 7, 229–230. 96. Abdullah, The Hikayat, 141, 150–153. 97. G. W. Earl, “Singapore in the Early 1830s,” in John Bastin, comp., Travellers’ Singapore: An Anthology (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994), 24; and Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years History of the Chinese in Singapore (London: John Murray, 1923), 61. Earl notes that the Tan Tock Seng Hospital replaced an earlier Chinese poorhouse, built from the proceeds of the government pork farm, that was never used as the poorhouse and became instead the convict jail.

276

notes to pages 78–86

98. Gorman, “Regulation, Reform and Resistance,” in CoC, chap. 4, 104. 99. See Arnold, “India: The Contested Prison,” in CoC, 159–161; Gorman, “Regulation, Reform and Resistance,” in CoC, 109. 100. Hancock, Coleman’s Singapore, 37, letter from Coleman, 1833. 101. Thannas are small huts built with timber and attap. 102. McNair, PTOW, 54. Built by Captain Lake, its lower story was susceptible to flooding and so was converted into the central police station in 1850. See IOR P/143/44, 197/8 of 27 March 1850. 103. IOR P/143/18 and 19, 196 (10 May 1848, no. 194/7), loose copy of plan of H. M. Jail 1848, in a letter from Governor SS, 29 March 1848, original source noted as India Judicial, N43. 104. M. L. Ahluwalia, Rebels Against the Raj (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 1967), 155, showing Doc. 73, Singapore, 21 November 1850. 105. See Markus, Buildings and Power, 122–123. 106. IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial: Costs, Melaka, Report for 1850–51, May 1851. 107. Although still in operation the sketch of the jail is recorded in 1872. 108. PRO CO 273/3, 790: From R. MacPherson, Melaka, 7 March 1859. Also see Collection 43, 440, July 1858. 109. This jail was on the same site as the current Penang jail. 110. IOR P/143/19 (1848, no. 276, and no. 280): Governor of PWI to A. R. Young, Under Secretary to the Govt. of Bengal, regarding existing condition, 3 November 1847. 111. Ibid. 112. IOR F/4/2520, India Judicial, 144695 (1851, no. 20): Lt. R. MacPherson to Resident Councilor PWI. 113. IOR P/143/19 (1848, no. 281): Governor SS to A. R. Young. 114. Arnold, “India: The Contested Prison,” in CoC, 157. 115. Ibid., 159. 116. Ibid., 161. 117. Ceylon, Gaols and Prisoners, Civil and Criminal Justice, 1865: Return of the gaols and houses of correction for the year ending 31 December 1865, 512–522, in PRO CO 57/40, 59–75: Report on prisons and prison discipline in Ceylon, 1866. 118. Arnold, “India: The Contested Prison,” in CoC, 148. 119. Following the recommendations of the Prison Disciplinary Commission, 1838, presided over by Lord Macaulay. 120. Kerr, Out of Sight, Out of Mind. 121. Ibid., 22. 122. Ibid., 37. 123. Markus, Buildings and Power, 107. 124. NL 2467, A45, 195–196: Site for new prison, Singapore, 8 February 1828.

notes to pages 86–91

277

125. NL 121, W2 (1835), 4: Design for Convict Jail and House of Correction. Letter from G. D. Coleman, 10 January 1835. 126. Ibid. 127. PRO CO 273/36, 50: Convict hospital, Singapore, hospital return for 1868. 128. IOR X/3349/2: Town Plan by J. T. Jackson, 1843; McNair, PTOW, 54. 129. McNair, PTOW, 71. 130. Ibid., 96–97. 131. Ibid., 77. 132. IOR: X/10178: Her Majesty’s Jail, Singapore 1848, based on town plan by S. Narayanen. 133. McNair, PTOW, 83. 134. Ibid., 79–82. 135. Sandhu, “Tamil and Other Convicts in the Straits Settlements,” 203. 136. Ibid.; IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial: Report on Jails, Singapore, November 1850. Of the thirty-seven cases of cholera admitted in 1850, sixteen were fatal. Ten of these cases were from among the TOL class who were out on security. There were sixty-six deaths in 1850–1851. 137. PRO CO 273/17, 354: Memorandum from McNair, Singapore, 16 March 1868. 138. See map in PRO CO 700/Straits/25, 98752; PRO CO 273/3, 10588: Baradaile to McNair, September 1859 (no. 213, 389). Brenda Yeoh mentions this second burial site off Serangoon Road, which was described in Malay as orang kena buang Bombay (people who were thrown out of Bombay). It is now the site of public housing in the vicinity of St. George’s Road. Yeoh, Contesting Space, 227. 139. Yeoh, Contesting Space. 140. PRO CO 273/17, 354, 358: Memorandum from McNair regarding the dry earth system of waste disposal used in the prison. Moule developed this system with James Bannehr in response to the cholera epidemics. 141. The design is comparable with the Old Melbourne Gaol. 142. PRO CO 273/69, 206: MPGG 17. New ward for Europeans at Singapore criminal prison, article of instruction no. 38, 10 February 1861. 143. I have not been able to ascertain the meaning of syriah. 144. PRO CO 273/19, 7442, 227: Report on Hospitals, 5 June 1868. 145. Ibid. 146. PRO CO 273/19, 227. 147. McNair, PTOW, 147–155. 148. Ibid., Appendix II, 170–171; F/4/2520 (1851, no. 17): List of Casualties, Capt Man to T. Church, 1 August 1851. 149. PRO CO 273/36, 50: Convict Hospital, Singapore, hospital return for 1868. During 1868, 510 male patients were admitted to the hospital in addition to the 21 already there, and 468 were cured of their diseases. There were 31 casualties.

278

notes to pages 91–96

150. McNair, PTOW, 171. 151. The Moule system was patented on 28 May 1860. 152. PRO CO 273/17, 354: Regarding comment by Dr. Mouat, Inspector General of Jails, Bengal; McNair, PTOW, 82, 83. 153. See Arnold, Colonizing the Body; Ian Brown, “A Commissioner Calls: Alexander Paterson and Colonial Burma’s Prisons,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (June 2007): 293–308. 154. See James and Nancy Duncan, “Technologies of Biopower and Discipline in Nineteenth Century Ceylon Prisons” (research project), http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/ research/projects/ceylonprisons/ (accessed 23 January 2008). 155. McNair, PTOW, 77–78.

Chapter 4: Hidden Hands

1. Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981), xiii–xv. 2. Smith, The Wealth of Nations. 3. See Ignatief, A Just Measure of Pain. 4. This chapter owes much to labor historiography, to Karl Marx’s critiques of capitalist exploitation, Max Weber’s analysis of the Protestant work ethic, Friedrich Engels’ exposure of working-class conditions, and Antonio Gramsci’s theories of subaltern consciousness. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England; Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976); Gramsci, Selections from ‘The Prison Notebooks.’ 5. IOR P/138/11 (3/25 January 1827, no. 13): Court of Directors orders from 1796– 1827, regarding prison discipline, management of jails, and treatment of prisoners, Fort William, January 1827, regarding the separation of classes. 6. McNair, PTOW, 5. Letter to the Court of Directors from Stamford Raffles, quoted by McNair. The letter was written from Benkulen in 1818 and reproduced in the first edition of his biography, Lady Sophia Raffles, Memoir of the life and public services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1830), Chapter X, 297–299. 7. McNair, PTOW, 6. 8. Ibid., 161. In reference to Herbert Spencer, “Prison-Ethics,” The British Quarterly Review (July 1860), in Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, vol. 3 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1891), http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/337/12298 (accessed 30 January 2008). Herbert Spencer is best known for his much-criticized “Social Darwinism.” 9. Spencer, “Prison-Ethics,” “These, then, are the requirements of an equitable penal system:—That the aggressor shall make restitution or compensation; that he shall

notes to pages 96–99

279

be placed under the restraints requisite for social security; that neither any restraints beyond these, nor any gratuitous penalties, shall be inflicted on him; and that while living in confinement, or under surveillance, he shall maintain himself.” 10. F. Mouat, Prison Discipline and its Results in Bengal (first published in the Journal of the Society of Arts in 1872), in Spencer, “Prison-Ethics.” 11. F. Mouat, Prison Industry in its Primitive, Reformatory, and Economic Aspects (London, November 1889), in Spencer, “Prison-Ethics.” 12. F. Mouat, “On Prison Ethics and Prison Labour,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 54, no. 2 (June 1891): 232. 13. McNair, PTOW, 40, 49; PRO CO 273/28, 233: McNair to Colonial Secretary, 15 February 1869. The rates for artificers, able-bodied man, and feeble men were reduced from 22, 12, and 6 cents per diem to 20, 9, and 3 cents per diem, respectively in 1864. Messengers and second-class artificers were paid 15 cents per diem. 14. Florence Bernault, “The Shadow of Rule: Colonial Power and Modern Punishment in Africa,” in CoC, chap. 3, 72. 15. Furnivall, The Fashioning of Leviathan, 48. 16. Ibid., 48, 51, 57. 17. Ibid., 44. 18. NL 23, 1043, A 66, 45–46, 1830. The distribution of convicts in 1829 in Penang had the largest number in public works as laborers, foresters, measurers, and cart drivers and numbered 417 out of 1,251 prisoners. 19. The distribution of convicts can be traced from Public Works Department accounts in the Blue Books for each year. 20. The filling up of the commercial square was begun with free labor and by local prisoners, but when the first transportees arrived they carried soil from the Hindu temple and Pearl’s Hill to fill up the square. McNair, PTOW, 35, 39. 21. Ibid., 44 (supervised by G. D. Coleman). 22. Ibid., 40–42 (supervised by Lt. Chester and Major Campbell). 23. Singapore Free Press, Centenary Number, 8 October 1935, 8, section 4. 24. IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial (1851, no. 17): Report for 1851–52, 1 August 1851. They were recorded as: Serangoon Road, Tanglin Road, Orchard Road, Bras Basah Road, Beach Road, Stamford Road, Bak Road, Magazine Road, Government Hill Road, Circular Road, Bukit Selegie Road, Steven’s Road, Hill Street, Esplanade Road, and bridges at Guthree’s, Rocher, River Valley, Laughing Road, Teluk Blangah, and Campong Malacca (Kampung Melaka). 25. McNair, PTOW, 56–57. 26. PRO CO 273/3, 148–158 (1858, no. 113 and no. 367): Chief Engineer Collyer to Surveyor General J. Mariot, 2 November 1858 (from reply sent on 3 November 1858). “Surveys of the town [were] never undertaken unless for objects directly connected with the revenue of the land office.”

280

notes to pages 99–100

27. NL 113, 81, 11 May 1854. Appendix J gives an example of the range of public works undertaken by convicts. 28. Abdullah, The Hikayat, 196. The road described here refers to the present Victoria Street area. 29. PRO CO 273/4, 685: Petition, Singapore Marine Coll. 9, 9 May 1860. They were rented out to boatmen and traders who previously stored their goods on the beaches free of charge. 30. PRO CO 273/15, 466 (16 January 1867, no. 7): Revenue Dept., 16 July 1866 and Resident Councilor Singapore, 10 September 1866 (no. 58). See also McNair, PTOW, 52. 31. Sharon Siddique and Nirmala PuruShotam, Singapore’s Little India (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1982), 10–11. Oral interview with a lady (name not included) regarding her great grandfather who was a convict. “[H]e bought land from Bras Basah Road until Jurong, Changi, Bedok, Woodlands—so much land he got. . . He buy land, sell. Sometimes he got houses and he rented them.” 32. “Somapah Family,” from oral interview with Jumabhoy Rajabali, Singapore National Archives, Oral History Project, A 000074/37 Reel 31, 29. “There is, I recall, a descendant still living of that family. The oldest resident convict’s son was born in Singapore and died here in 1919. He had acquired, or rather was given by the government for agricultural purposes, land at Changi. There exists Somapah Road even now in his name. He has his descendants still living in Singapore and that is the oldest family. They own some other properties and are also in business. Most of their descendants are in clerical service with the government.” 33. Yeoh, Contesting Space, 37; PRO CO 273/3, 927 (1859, no. 38): From Acting Resident Councilor, Malacca to Blundell, 14 April 1859. 34. PRO CO 273/3, 958, coll. 16, August 1859; PRO CO 273/3, 1063: Extracts from the minutes of the proceedings of the Municipal Commission, 27 November 1856. Resolution under section XI of Act XIV of 1856. 35. Straits Times Overland Journal, 4 July, from Straits Times, 27 June 1868. A convict would hoist and drop a ball along a slender pole to match the duration of noonday chimes by the town clock. Fort Canning would respond with cannon fire. 36. PRO CO 273/4, 101 (1860): Singapore, coll. 3. Irregularity of salutes. 37. PRO CO 273/15, 466 (16 January 1867, no. 7, 16 July 1866): Resident Councilor, Singapore, 10 September 1866 (no. 58); PRO CO 273/27: Distribution of orderlies, McNair, 6 February 1869. They also tended the grounds of the Raffles Institution, Singapore, and free school in Penang. 38. PRO CO 273/3, Singapore (August 1859, coll. 16), 958; IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial (1851, no. 17): Capt. Man to T. Church, Res. Councilor, Singapore, 1 August 1851, regarding distribution of convicts.

notes to pages 100–!02

281

39. McNair, PTOW, 42; PRO CO 273/3, 923: Fire at brick and tile farms 25 April 1859; NL 23, 1043, A 66, 1830, 45–6: Distribution of convicts, 1 June 1829; NL 1100, 4492. Return of number of convicts 20 June 1870. 40. PRO CO 273/3, 9: Political Dept., Lord Stanley to Governor General of India, in council, March 1859 (no. 7). Between 1855 and 1856, Indian convicts numbered 3,845, of which 1,839 were in Singapore. 41. PRO CO 273/7, 4 (1863–1866): Regarding the transfer from the Indian government to the Colonial Office, 20 May 1859. 42. “No complaint has been made against them though in the first instance their presence in the neighborhood was much dreaded by the county residents.” IOR F/4/2520 (1851, no. 431), 16: E. A. Blundell, Esq., Resident Councilor, PWI to Lt. Col. W. J. Butterworth, Governor of PWI and Melaka (Annual Report of PWI). 43. McNair, PTOW, 68–69. Head scares related to convicts and convict escapes. 44. Ibid., 67. Description of the riots of 1851. 45. NL 169/27, 143, Singapore, 6 January 1832. 46. McNair, PTOW, 43, 121. 47. Syces = drivers. 48. IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial (1851, no.17): Capt. Man, Superintendent of convicts to T. Church, Resident Councilor, Singapore, 1 August 1851. 49. NL 1976, Singapore Free Press, 4 October 1884. Account on Major J. F. A. McNair. 50. McNair, PTOW, 108–109. 51. Ibid. 52. PRO CO 273/3, 270 (1859, no. 122): Chief Engineer, SS to Captain W. J. Mitchell, Acting Chief Engineer, Penang, March 1859. Statement of materials supplied to public works by the government brick kiln from December 1855 to August 1858; Blue Book for 1855–1856 (the exact meaning of cyan in this context is unclear). 53. PRO CO 273/4, 1072: From a Report by McNair on the brick making industry in Penang, 18 August 1860; PRO CO 273/4, 573 (1860, no. 137): Singapore, 31 December 1859, cost of brick-making machine is $8,297.42. 54. IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial (1851, no. 99): The Various Reforms, 1 May 1851. 55. McNair, PTOW, 109–110. 56. McNair, PTOW, 111. Women also made water cement, brick jelly, and chunam for plaster work. 57. Ibid., 61. Stone quarried from Pulau Ubin was used on the Horsburg lighthouse and the convicts lived on a tong kong, with the government assistant, to conduct this work. Stone was even exported to Burma to build the Alguada Reef lighthouse. 58. IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial (1851), 12. 59. CO 273-2 (1859, no. 1): Govt. of the Straits, Foreign Dept., Singapore, First Quarter of 1858; McNair, PTOW, x.

282

notes to pages 102–110

60. Furnivall, The Fashioning of Leviathan, 46. 61. A. G. Green, “Prison Discipline in Ceylon,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Ceylon) II, pt. II, no. 5 (1849): 169. 62. Arnold, “India: The Contested Prison,” in CoC, chap. 5, 161–162. 63. Arnold, “The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge and Penology in 19th Century India,” 165. 64. Mouat, “On Prison Ethics and Prison Labour,” 229. 65. Arnold, “India: The Contested Prison,” in CoC, 162. 66. Gorman, “Regulation, Reform and Resistance,” in CoC, 120–121. 67. Mouat, “On Prison Ethics and Prison Labour,” 241, table 1. 68. Bernault, “The Shadow of Rule: Colonial Power and Modern Punishment in Africa,” in CoC, 73. 69. Brown, “Southeast Asia: Reform and the Colonial Prison,” in CoC, chap. 7, 242–244. 70. Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille, 16-17. 71. Brown, “Southeast Asia: Reform and the Colonial Prison,” in CoC, 266; and Brown, “A Commissioner Calls.” 72. Brown, “Southeast Asia: Reform and the Colonial Prison,” in CoC, 256–261. 73. Arnold, “India: The Contested Prison,” in CoC, 150–151. 74. Ibid., 174. 75. Bernault, “The Shadow of Rule: Colonial Power and Modern Punishment in Africa,” in CoC, 73–74. 76. Gorman, “Regulation, Reform and Resistance,” in CoC, 116–118. Gorman notes, however, that in smaller prisons and in women’s prisons this was not the case. 77. PRO CO 54, 419: Report on the Prisons and Prison Discipline, Ceylon, 1866. 78. Brown, “A Commissioner Calls,” 304. 79. Ignatief, A Just Measure of Pain, 11. 80. See Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, eds. The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 81. IOR P/206/61, Judicial Consultations (1859, no. 463): W. T. Lewis Resident Councilor PWI to Secretary to Governor SS, 24 September 1858; IOR F/4/2712 (1856, no. 130): India Public, coll. no. 58, 12 July 1855 and 2182 A of 1855. 82. IOR P/143/25, 118/119 and 120 of 8 November 1848. 83. IOR F/4/2619, 16542, India Judicial, coll. 50/56 (21 November 1855, no. 50): Scale of ration and clothing allowed David Thoms, 28 June 1855. 84. Ibid. 85. IOR F/4/2712, India Public, coll. no. 58 (1856, no. 130):12 July 1855. 86. IOR P/206/61 (1859, no. 463): Judicial Consultations, W. T. Lewis, Resident Councilor, PWI to Secretary to Gov. SS, 24 September 1858.

notes to pages 110–112

283

87. IOR P/206/53 (27 July 1853): Governor Blundell to Cecil Beadon, Secretary to Gov. of India, 1 June 1853. 88. PRO CO 273/60: Report on the Prisons of the Straits Settlements, 1872, Appendix 10, 12, quoting Report of 1868 on Prisons in Ceylon, 154. 89. PRO CO 273/3, 132 (1858, no. 285): Playfair to Chief Engineer, SS, 5 October 1858; PRO CO 273/3, 130 (1858, no. 149): J. F. A. McNair, Executive Engineer and Superintendent Convicts and Roads to the Resident Councilor of Singapore, 1 September 1858; Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, 412. 90. PRO CO 273/3, 481 (1859): Penang House of Correction. In Penang there was a 193-foot ward for one hundred men along one of the boundary walls of the prison. The interior was divided by a 120-foot-long central wall both sides of which could be used to house “native” prisoners. The building was located within its own yard with a cook house and bathhouse nearby. 91. PRO CO 273/28, 30–39: McNair to Col. Secretary SS, 28 February 1869; IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial: SS Convict statement reports 1850–1851. Convicts were expected to produce a daily quota of eight baskets or ten cubic feet of hard granite for road metal or beat two pounds of coconut fiber, first beating dry husk, then after soaking it in water for twenty-four hours to loosen the fibers and separating them with a wooden mallet. Rice husking was performed mechanically by the movement of feet in a contraption with a hammer, resembling the tread wheel or the crank. When raw materials ran out, convicts were employed in cutting firewood from dense tropical ironwoods or shot drill (moving cannon balls to different locations, to no purpose). PRO CO 273/3, 2nd quarter 1859, 482: Penang, House of Correction. 92. The walking sticks were famously called “Penang lawyers,” and the long lounge cane chair was said to have been invented and perfected at the Singapore jail. See McNair, PTOW, 24 and Makepeace, Brooke, and Braddell, One Hundred Years of Singapore, vol. 1, 286. 93. PRO CO 273/3, 486 (2nd quarter 1859). 94. Ibid., 491: Memo of W. J. Lewis, Resident Councilor. 95. Ibid. 96. Gorman, “Regulation, Reform and Resistance,” in CoC, 140, 104 fn 29. They were named after the director of prisons Charles Coles Pasha. 97. Ibid., 236–238. 98. PRO CO 273/3, 491. 99. PRO CO 273/60, 457: Mr. Shelford, Singapore, 27 June 1872; PRO CO 273/3, 491. The average number of prisoners was always over 150 and included men convicted of misdemeanors, lascars (sailors) who had deserted from ships, and plantation coolies who had abandoned their contracts. 100. PRO CO 273/3, 946 (3rd quarter 1859): Penang coll. 5, trying subjects at police court.

284

notes to pages 112–114

101. IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial (1851, no. 99): The Various Reforms, 1 May 1851. The sixth class numbered sixty-six in 1851, thirteen of whom were incapable of work. 102. Ibid. Convicts employed in hard labor numbered 858 in Singapore in 1851 and were employed on roads and other public works. 103. IOR F/4/2604, 163021, India Public, SS coll. 124, 54 and 55 (1854, no. 19): Organization of a body of convict artificers, 28 February 1854; IOR F/4/2604, 162951, India Public (1853, no. 96), SS coll. 59, 26 November 1853; IOR F/4/2604, 162951, T. Church Resident Councilor to R. Church, Secretary to Gov. SS, 14 May 1853; IOR F/4/2604, 162951, Governor Blundell to Govt. of India Home Dept., 25 May 1853. The rules for the formation of a body of convict artificers outlined by E. A. Blundell in 1853 stated that they could be drawn from the first four classes and their wages would be graduated, with the first class receiving one dollar per month, the second class 50 cents, the third class 25 cents, and the fourth class the chance to learn a trade in addition to their rations and allowance. Each trade was to have at least five men, an underforeman for every fifteen men, and a Straits-born Portuguese or Eurasian foreman who was familiar with Asian construction methods and languages. In Singapore, foreman De Costa was appointed for examining and purchasing materials while Rubeiro undertook brick kiln management. 104. IOR F/4/2604, 163021, Blue Book: The report for 1856–1857 enumerated 99 masons, 73 carpenters, 11 blacksmiths, 28 stonecutters, 1 basket maker, 2 cement makers, 24 brick makers, 6 tile makers, and 12 painters in Singapore. 105. IOR F/4/2604, 162951, India Public, SS coll. 59 (1853, no. 96): Rules for organizing a body of convict artificers, 26 November 1853. European overseers were needed for new methods of construction such as screw piles or water works. 106. McNair, PTOW, 91 107. Ibid.,105. 108. Ibid., 104. 109. Ibid., 106–107. 110. Ibid., 92; IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial (1851, no. 17): Report on the conduct of transmarine convicts, 1 August 1851; PRO CO 273/3, 218–219 (1859, no. 42): McNair to the Chief Engineer SS, Singapore, March 1859; PRO CO 273/28, 231: Capt J. Burn to Secretary to Govt. of India, Fort William, 25 April 1864. 111. PRO CO 273/3, 218 (1859, no. 37): Chief Engineer, Collyer to Governor SS, 11 March 1859. “Day work” was the daily labor undertaken by carpenters or blacksmiths, “task work” was more strenuous such as scavenging and other heavy labor, and “piecework” was measured according to the object produced. 112. PRO CO 273/3, 218–219 (1859, no. 42): March 1859; PRO CO 273/3, 220 (1859, no. 119): Governor Blundell, Singapore to the Chief Engineer SS, 16 March 1859. Since measurement and payment of manual tasks was difficult, laborers employed at task work would receive incentives rather than a wage at the discretion of the superintendent.

notes to pages 114–118

285

113. PRO CO 273/40, 224, 227: Extract from proceedings of govt. of India, 28 October 1869, System of Central Jails. It was extremely rare for a convict (in Indian jails) to support himself upon his release by a trade he had learned while in confinement, unless it was related to his “ancestral pursuits.” 114. IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial (1851, no. 17), 1 August 1851. 115. IOR F/4/2604, 163021 (1853, no. 57): Classification of convict artificers at Melaka. From the third class, Moodiansey peon, Banda, Saradiel Appu were employed as carpenters; Miguel Appu as a blacksmith; Andrees Moodiansey, Punci Ralle, and Huratella as bricklayers; Punci Appu, Dingeria, and Appuralle as chunam burners. 116. McNair, PTOW, 29. 117. Ibid., 105. Mouat recommended adding steam-powered machinery for spinning jute yarn so that the prisoners may never be without hard labor. 118. PRO CO 273/22, 211: Clerk of Council’s office to Acting Colonial Secretary, Singapore, 13 October 1868, report on printing office. Printed material includes general orders and circular memoranda, minutes of council, bills for council, ordinance for council, printed papers for council, edition of the laws, estimates, lists of establishments, comparative statements; PRO CO 273/3, 278 (1859, no. 530): Superintendent Burn to Chief Engineer, Singapore, 14 November 1859. The printing press appropriated the rooms for the assistant jailer. 119. McNair, PTOW, 107. 120. Ibid. See also, NL 1976, Singapore Free Press, 4 October 1884. Account on Major J. F. A. McNair. 121. Chatterjee, Texts of Power, 6. 122. Jon Sun Hock Lim, “Colonial Architecture and Architects of Georgetown (Penang) and Singapore between 1786–1942,” 5 vols. (PhD thesis, School of Architecture, National University of Singapore, 1990), vol. I, 33. 123. Rabinow, French Modern; Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum, Hindus, Prison and Plantation. 124. King, Colonial Urban Development. 125. IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial: Convict Reports for 1850–1851, Butterworth Regulations, 23 August 1851. 126. Ibid.; Maistry = a master carpenter who trains others. 127. POR CO 273/4, 4, PW Ecclesiastical (1860, no. 2). Coleman’s church failed due to the excessive weight of the timber roof structure and was subsequently struck by lightning. 128. NL 2202, Singapore Free Press, 6 January 1854. Outbreak by Sikh convicts occurred in the convict lines. A “head scare” at St. Andrews was attributed to this escape. 129. Abdullah describes the spread of the rumors among the Malay community in Abdullah, The Hikayat, 245–249; see also Moore and Moore, The First Hundred and Fifty Years of Singapore, 271; and McNair, PTOW, 68.

286

notes to pages 118–121

130. McNair, PTOW, 97. 131. PRO CO 273/4, 665, PW Ecclesiastical (1860, no. 107): 4 June 1860. Observation made by McNair noted in PTOW, 65. 132. NL 104, U34, 14 November 1857, stoppage of all public works. 133. McNair, PTOW, 99. 134. Ibid. 135. Ibid.,100; chunam = lime. 136. PRO CO 273/4, 65, PW Ecclesiastical, 2 March 1860. 137. Ibid., 13. 138. Jon Lim, “Colonial Architecture and Architects,” vol. 1, 117–118, quoted in Goh, Contours of Culture, 35. Lim comments on the advocation of steeples by the Anglican bishop of Calcutta. 139. Goh, Contours of Culture, 35. 140. PRO CO 273/4, 660–665. 141. Ibid., 665. 142. St. Andrews Cathedral, The Diocese of Singapore (pamphlet); PRO CO 273/4, 11. Capt. J. F. A. McNair, Ex-Eng. Singapore to Chief Engineer SS, no. 60, 15 May 1860. 143. Ibid. 144. PRO CO 273/4, 423, India Marine: coll. 10, Singapore, August 1860. 145. PRO CO 273/4, 65; they included prison improvements, the new town hall and rubble-work at Raffles Light House, Fort Fullerton Battery, Mt. Faber Battery, Lakes Battery, and Johnston’s Pier. 146. McNair, PTOW, 73. 147. PRO CO 273/3, 732: Rev. G. C. Smith to F. L. Playfair, 10 February 1859. Payment of employees of St. Andrew’s church. 148. McNair, PTOW, 107; PRO CO 273/8, 353: PWD Establishment. 149. Bawajee Rajaram was one of the first technical assistants of the executive engineers office to set up his own practice. Lim, Transforming Traditions: Architecture in ASEAN Countries, 182; Singapore Free Press, Centenary Number, 8 October 1935, section 5, 9, attributes several public and military buildings to him (possibly as tracer). For examples of projects submitted by him, see Lim, “Colonial Architecture and Architects,” vol. 1, 181, which shows that he was enlisted as a TA (technical assistant) between 1864 and 1874 with the Singapore chief engineer’s office, under McNair. A list of his submission plans to the Singapore municipality in vol. 3 of Lim’s thesis includes (with page numbers): bungalow at Monk’s Hill (1889), 266; bungalow at Devonshire Road (1890), 227; alteration to villa at Short Street (1895), 228; addition to villa at Victoria Street (1895), 229; house (1887), 230. 150. Cavanagh Bridge was assembled by convicts. 151. PRO CO 273/45, 474, 25 March 1871. On his first official visit outside Thailand (1871), Chulalankorn, the king of Siam, came to Singapore and was taken on a tour of its new institutions including the prisons.

notes to pages 121–125

287

152. Goh, Contours of Culture, 39. Goh makes this comment based on observation of contemporary Singapore. 153. PRO CO 273/3, 17 August 1859. 154. Turnbull, The Straits Settlements, 63. 155. Hancock, Coleman’s Singapore, 26, observes that the portico and pediment were reminiscent of Palladio’s Villa Malcontenta of 1551. Maxwell sold this building to George Gerald de H. Larpent and John Cockerell in 1829, who in turn sold it to the government in 1841. 156. The offices in the old courthouse were moved instead to the new building and it resumed its original function as a courthouse. 157. Liu, In Granite and Chunam, 14. 158. The building was expanded in 1880, 1904–1909, and 1920 as government offices increased and was identified with Empress Place, the public square in front of it (so named to commemorate Queen Victoria in 1907). Today the original building is the central portion of the new wing of the Asian Civilizations Museum. 159. PRO CO 273/37, 4661, SS, 155: Singapore 25 March 1870. The distribution and numbers of peons and orderlies: governor 4, colonial secretary 3, lt. governor Penang 2, Malacca 2, chief justice 3, judge of Penang 3, colonial engineer 2, and one each to all the other heads of department. Court peons included: Singapore 3, Penang 3, Melaka 2. 160. PRO CO 273/28, 235: Controller of Convicts to Col. Secretary, Singapore 15 February 1869. The distribution of convicts in 1868 included: second class, 315 in gangs, 196 as messengers and orderlies, and 97 artisans; first class, 192 as masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, brickmakers, stonecutters, painters, and other trades; third, fourth and fifth classes, 1,287 laborers, and sixth class, 145 invalids. 161. Ibid.; PRO CO 273/31 (1869, no. 557), 220: Lt. Governor Anson’s office, PWI, to Colonial Secretary, Singapore, 11 September 1869. 162. IOR F/4/2520, 144695, India Judicial (1851, no. 17): Capt. Man Superintendent of Convicts to T. Church Resident Councilor, Singapore, 1 August 1851. 163. PRO CO 273/19, 7442, 198: Governor SS to Duke of Buckingham, 5 June 1868. 164. Lee Yong Kiat, “The 1926 General Hospital Singapore,” Annals Academy of Medicine, Singapore 34 (2005): 52C–60C, 54C. See also Lee, The Medical History of Singapore (Tokyo: South East Asian Medical Information Center, no. 14, 1978), for a detailed account. 165. Dhoraisingam, Singapore’s Heritage, 44. 166. Lee, “The 1926 General Hospital Singapore.” 167. PRO CO 273/19, 7442, 214. 168. Lee, The Medical History of Singapore, 49–58. 169. Arnold, Colonizing the Body. 170. PRO CO 273/3, 954: Singapore PWD, coll. 10, July 1859. The hospitals inside the prison were not cellular and the lepers ward was adjacent to the house of correction in Singapore.

288

notes to pages 125–128

171. The Fresnes Prison, by architect Henry Poussin, was built in the suburbs of Paris much later, in 1895–1898, and was the model for Baumettes, Marseilles, and Riker’s Island, New York. 172. PRO CO 273/19, 7442, 235. 173. The figure, 1,800 cubits, is probably achieved by a multiplication of three dimensions: the width of the ward, its height, and the space of and around the bed. 174. PRO CO 273/19, 7442, 272. 175. Ibid. 176. Ibid., 214. 177. Ibid., 227. 178. Ibid. Mental patients typically died of mania, monomania, a mantia, dementia, mania chronica, melancholia, and atrophia. 179. Ibid., 266. 180. Ibid., 284. “Picking oakum,” the fibers from the jute plant, was a term used to describe the unraveling of old ropes to recycle their strands for use in caulking. 181. Ibid., 266. 182. Ibid., 198. 183. PRO CO 273/3, 880 (1859, no. 175): From Senior Surgeon SS to Resident Councilor Singapore. 184. PRO CO 273/5, 149, Home Dept. (1860, no. 82): Resident Councilor, Melaka to Secretary to Governor, Melaka, 29 June 1860. The leper hospital in Melaka was built by Tan Koon Seow (?) and maintained by public contributions. It was subsequently moved to Pulau Sarimbon, an island eight miles to the south of the town. 185. Makepeace, Brooke, and Braddell, One Hundred Years of Singapore, vol. 2, 491, notes that E. J. Robertson, in Straits Memories, recollects being wheeled out in a carriage by a convict. 186. IOR P/136/66, 8/19 May 1825, no. 228; according to the regulations of 1827 domestic servants were to be paid one and a half to two dollars per month. 187. PRO CO 273/60, 460–462: Legislative Council Singapore 4 July 1872. According to Dr. Little, “I have known a lady say that in her choice of convict servants she preferred murderers, because if she took robbers they might steal again, but there was little chance of repeating a murder, and perhaps it is on the same principle that they are selected as cooks because the others maybe guilty of pilfering.” 188. NL 23, 1043, A 66, 1830, 48. The employers were R. Ibbetson, A. J. Kerr, C. W. H. Wright, J. W. Salmond, Rev. R. A. Denton, A. McIntosh, S. Rentens, E. Jeremiah, J. Ash, P. Ogilie, E. S. Porns, R. Jeremiah, Capt. Danson, and Dr. Grant, and convicts were from the third, fourth and fifth classes. 189. PRO CO 273/12, 10478, 98 (1867): Estimates for 1867, 27 August 1867. 190. PRO CO 273/18 (1868); TOL convicts numbered 595 out of 2,553 transported prisoners.

notes to pages 128–133

289

191. Sen, Disciplining Punishment, 2–3. 192. Ibid. 193. Ibid.

Chapter 5: The Perils of Association

1. Dikötter, “Introduction,” in CoC, 9. 2. Ibid., 11. 3. IOR F/4/2520, India Judicial 144695, The Various Reforms, 1 May 1851, Convict literacy: In 1851, among the entire body of convicts, 100 could read and write with accuracy, 59 imperfectly, 1,220 not at all. 4. PRO CO 273/25, 3519 SS, 308: Public Schools in PWI. James Makay, Secretary, Penang, 20 February 1868. 5. IOR P/138/11, 3/25 January 1827: Court of directors orders from 1796 to 1827 regarding prison discipline, management of jails, and treatment of prisoners. W. H. MacNaghton, Registrar, Fort William to H. Shakespeare, Secretary to Government in the Judicial Department. 6. McNair, PTOW, chap. X. 7. Markus, Buildings and Power, 119, in reference to Cesare Beccaria, Dei Delitti e delle Pene (On Crimes and Punishments) (Liverno, 1764). 8. PRO CO 273/37, 5217, 333 (1870). 9. See Arnold, “The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge and Penology in 19th Century India.” 10. IOR P/138/11 Bengal Judicial Proceedings (3/25 January 1827): Court of Directors orders from 1796 to 1827 regarding prison discipline, management of jails, and treatment of prisoners. W. H. MacNaghton, Registrar, Fort William to H. Shakespeare, Secretary to Government in the Judicial Department. 11. IOR P/136/57, Bengal Judicial Proceedings (9/13 January 1825): Resolution passed on 4 August 1824 by Government at Fort William on removal of convicts from Benkulen for PWI. 12. Arnold, “India: The Contested Prison,” in CoC, 150. 13. There were insurrections in Ceylon in 1818, 1822, 1835, and 1843, previous to the one in 1848. Illustrated London News, 17 August 1850, courtesy Ismeth Raheem. In high-caste Kandyan families the sons are typically named according to their relative position in the family, i.e., Loku (Big), Madduma (Middle), or Tikiri (Young). Since “banda” is synonymous with “boy” or “son,” Tikiri Banda will be referred to by his first name, “Tikiri,” hereafter. 14. Loku Banda was implicated in a plot to poison the governor and the leading officials, seduce the Malays from their allegiance to the British government, and with the Malays’ assistance to destroy the European garrison stationed in Kandy. From J. A.

290

notes to pages 133–136

Dunuwila’s diary, 1 January 1861 to 9 July 1861, 22, noted by Irangani Ratwatte. James Dunuwila is the youngest of Milleva’s sons. 15. Morrell, British Colonial Policy in the Age of Peel and Russell, 528–532. 16. PRO CO 55/252: The Pretender, 5 December 1848 (no. 217); The Rebellion, 6 November 1848, 195; Ordinances proposed for raising taxes, the gun tax, the dog tax, and shop licenses, 14 November 1848, 203 (see CO 54–55 for details of the 1848 rebellion in Ceylon). 17. K. M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2003), 277. According to the corvée system, serfs had to work temporarily as slaves. In Ceylon this translated as service rendered to the king and was the basis of the caste system. 18. See Capt. John MacDonald Henderson, The History of the Rebellion in Ceylon During Lord Torrington’s Government Affording a Comparison with Jamaica and Governor Eyre (London: Charles J. Skeet, 1868). See also SLNA: The Select Committee on Ceylon, 1850: Return of Court Martials 417–439; Minutes of Evidence, appendix Z, 316, 585–587, reports, 644–645, 742, 748. 19. Irangani Dunuwila Ratwatte, personal communication, 2004. 20. According to oral accounts he had rubbed chili pepper in the horse’s anus, causing it to bolt. Irangani Ratwatte, personal communication. 21. Archibald Campbell Lawrie, A Gazetteer of the Central Province of Ceylon, vol. 1 (Colombo: George J. A. Skeen, Government Printer Ceylon, 1896), 194–197. 22. PRO CO 273/21, 12041 SS, 330–376: Melaka was established as a receiving station for Ceylon convicts in 1846, and in 1864 there were 367 Ceylon convicts in the colony. 23. SLNA Select Committee on Ceylon, third report, ordered by the House of Commons 13 February 1851, Appendix G, paper no. 7. Copy of Dispatch from Viscount Torrington to Earl Grey 15 January 1850; PRO CO 55/252: Queens House to Rt. Hon. Earl Grey, 5 December (no. 217). That the pretender king has been captured and the rebellion subsided. Gongalegoda Banda was convicted for high treason in the supreme court, Ceylon, on 27 November, and sentenced to transportation for life. 24. SLNA Select Committee on Ceylon, third report, Appendix G, paper no. 7. 25. NL 103/U33, General (1857, no. 338, no. 116): R. Church, Secretary to W. W. William Esq. Assistant to Resident and in charge of the Malacca Residency, Singapore, 20 March 1857. 26. NL 92 (1857, no. 1377): Regarding the memorial from Tikiri Banda. Cecil Beadon, Secretary to Government of India, to E. A. Blundell, Governor of Melaka, Penang, and Singapore, enclosing the response from Capt. Man to Under Secretary Govt. of India Home Dept. 21 August 1857. The response written from Moulmein, 6 June 1857. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid.

notes to pages 136–139

291

29. Ibid. 30. Green, “Prison Discipline in Ceylon,” 167. 31. Ibid., 167, 171–172. 32. It is noteworthy that the Dunuwila family donated the land for Trinity College, the foremost Christian College in Kandy. 33. NL 92 (1857, no. 1377): Capt. Man to Under Secretary Govt. of India Home Dept. 21 August 1857. The person concerned may have been the new superintendent of convicts, Ronald MacPherson. 34. This could also be Mr. Klasper (the writing is indistinct). 35. NL 92 (1857, no. 1377): Capt. Man to Under Secretary Govt. of India Home Dept. 21 August 1857. 36. Ibid. 37. Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, 376–380. 38. McNair, PTOW, 113–117. The incident is related to a Siamese mission visiting Kandy and their access to the Buddha’s tooth relic, which Tikiri facilitated through his ingenuity. 39. John M. Seneveratne (M.B.E.), The Dunuwille Family (Colombo: The Daily News Press, Lake House, n.d.), courtesy Durand Appuhamy and Irangani Dunuwila Ratwatte. 40. P. B. Panabokke and J. A. Halangoda eds., The Autobiography of Tikiri Banda Panbokke (Kandy: Miller and Co, Ltd., 1938?), 16. Panabokke describes entering the lower form at Dr. Boake’s institution (Royal College) to find “there were besides three of my countrymen, Illangakoon and the two Dunuwilla brothers George and Charles.” In fact, Charles had three sons, Edwin Gilbert, Charles Herbert, and Richard Melvyn, who cumulatively produced sixteen grandchildren. Sonny Dunuwila of Vatapoluva, Kandy, and Kumari Dasanayake of Gampaha, from among them, have been particularly helpful in tracing his descendants. 41. Ahluwalia, Rebels Against the Raj, v. 42. Maharaj is not his original name but rather a respectful title given to him by his followers. Justice Choor Singh Sidhu, personal communication, Singapore, 2001. 43. Ahluwalia, Rebels Against the Raj, xv. 44. Ibid., 87, doc. no. 24, 5 January 1850. 45. NL 5557, Straits Times, 11 August 1857. 46. Ahluwalia, Rebels Against the Raj, 69, document no. 13: Henry Vansittart to D. F. McLeod. Vansittart observes that when Maharaj Singh and his companions were led to the jail, many of the Sikh guards bowed down before him. Vansittart’s own popularity among the locals was said to have diminished following the capture. 47. Ibid., 117–118, doc. no. 47: Note on the file of Governor General Dalhousie 22 March 1850, J.H.L, 23 March 1850. 48. Ibid., 126, doc. no. 53, 3 May 1850.

292

notes to pages 139–142

49. Ibid., 153, doc. no. 72: Governor of PWI to F. J. Halliday, Secretary to the Govt. of India, Fort William. 50. Ibid., 156, doc. no. 73. 51. Ibid., 157, doc. no. 74. 52. IOR F/4/2570, 151.779, collection no. 1 (1854, no. 42): Letter from the Governor General in Council, 13 May 1854, paragraphs 73 and 74. 53. Ibid., 151.780 paragraphs 75 to 77; Ghurree = 24 minutes, puhar/prahar = 3 hours or so (courtesy Will Glover and Farina Mir). 54. Ibid.; Slaokumnamah = send us your good word (courtesy Will Glover and Farina Mir). 55. Translation of the letter of Maharaj Singh to Bhaee Jusurout Singh at Aurangabad. 56. Ahluwalia, Rebels Against the Raj, 168, doc. no. 85, Singapore, 1 July 1856. 57. Ibid., 170, doc. no. 86, Singapore, 12 July 1856. 58. NL 268 R 32, 60–64, 24 August 1857: To Secretary to Government of India, Fort William, Foreign Department; acc. to from E. A. Blundell Gov. of SS, 31 December 1856 recorded in NL 523, item 286 (31 December 1856 no. 269). 59. NL 5557, Straits Times, 11 August 1857; NL 268 R 32, 60–64, 24 August 1857. 60. NL 92, F. Edmonton, Secretary to Govt. of India to E. A. Blundell, 2 October 1857. 61. NL 268 R 32, 60–64, 24 August 1857. 62. The canonization of Nihal Singh by the Sikh community is described in Choor Singh Sidhu, Bhai Maharaj Singh: Martyr of the Sikh Faith (Singapore: Central Sikh Gurdwara Board, 1999; and in Seva Singh Gandharab, The Early Pioneer Sikhs of Singapore (pamphlet, 1986), 2. For the history of the gurdwar, see Balbindar Kaur Dhaliwal, “Gurdwara Sahib Silat Road (Silat Road Sikh Temple),” National Library Board, Singapore, Singapore Infopedia, http://infopedia.nl.sg/articles/SIP_402_2004-12-14.html (accessed 24 June 2008). 63. PRO CO 273/60, 11, 12: Report of the Commission on Prison Discipline, 4 June 1872, appendix A. The quotations that follow are from the same source. 64. PRO CO 273/44, 2959 (1871, no. 197), 538–560, 544: McNair to Col. Secretary, SS, Singapore, 1 January 1871. 65. PRO CO 273/40, 226–227, Govt. of India to Secretary of State of India, 11 April 1868. Extract from proceedings of Govt. of India, 28 October 1869. 66. IOR P/206/61, Fort William (20 May 1859, 13): Extract from proceedings of Foreign Department, no. 2527, 10 May 1859, prohibiting the admission of missionaries into the jail unless a prisoner requests the presence of one. 67. Nizamat Adawlut, Agra, November 1853, vol. 3, no. XI, 1402–1407. 68. IOR F/4/2712, 194882, India Public, coll. 58, Public Narrative, 3rd Quarter of 1855 (1856, no. 130): 25 October 1856; Blundell to Secretary of Government of India, 12 July 1855; Resident Councilor, Singapore, Church to the Secretary to Govt. of India, 10

notes to pages 143–148

293

July 1855 (including Capt. MacPherson’s medical report). 69. NL 91, 2839: 3, 269 and enclosure. 70. PRO CO 273/3, coll. 22, SS, 809 and (1859, no. 74), 908: September 1859 and 2 June 1859. 71. NL 91, 2839: 3, 269 and enclosure; IOR F/4/2520, India Judicial, 144695 (1851, no. 17): Capt. Man, Superintendent of Convicts, to T. Church, Resident Councilor, Singapore, 1 August 1851; NL 603 DD 34, item 86, June 1861. Re: Rules respecting female convicts. 72. Arnold, “India: The Contested Prison,” in CoC, 167, 173. 73. PRO CO 273/22, 13149, SS, 124: Circular to Duke of Buckingham from Governor SS, 12 October 1868, on capital punishment. 74. Arnold, Colonizing the Body. 75. Arnold, “India: The Contested Prison,” in CoC, 149. 76. Ibid., 170. 77. Ibid., 154–156. 78. Ibid., 161. 79. Green, “Prison Discipline in Ceylon,” 168. 80. Anderson, “The Politics of Convict Space,” 42. 81. Ibid, 43. 82. Gorman, “Regulation, Reform and Resistance,” in CoC, 143. 83. Ibid., 130–136. 84. PRO CO 273/37, 5217, SS, 324, no. 80, 9 April 1870. 85. Ibid., 354, Singapore, 24 March 1870. 86. Ibid., 346, enclosure two. 87. Ibid., 351. 88. Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille, 98–99. 89. Ibid., 11. 90. Ibid., 115. 91. PRO CO 273/55, 5297, SS, 478: W. Stuart to Earl of Kimberly. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. PRO CO 273/37, 333: Statement by T. Keyt, 1870, S 217. 95. PRO CO 273/12, 10481 (1867), 131, 137, 143: Petition of Thomas Keyt, Convict Gaol, Prince of Wales Island, September 1867. To his Excellency, Sir Harry St. George Ord, enclosure in 10481/67, 139; To her most gracious majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, from, John Thomas Keyt, Penang Gaol, 6 September 1867. 96. Ibid.. Also in Blue Book for 1865, Ceylon, 512–533, Civil Lists. 97. PRO CO 273/12, 10481 (1867), 140, Penang, 28 August 1867, Testimonial included of A. G. Green, Welikedde (Welikada) Gaol.

294

notes to pages 148–154

98. PRO CO 273/12, 10481 (1867), 139. Petition of Thomas Keyt. 99. PRO CO 273/37, 333 (1870), S217. 100. Arnold, “The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge and Penology in 19th Century India,” 145. 101. Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille, 99. 102. PRO CO 273/40, 1266, SS, 198: Governor to Earl of Kimberly, 22 October 1870. 103. PRO CO 273/28, 3783, SS (March 1869), 2: from Governor Ord to Earl Granville, Acting Governor of Ceylon in Dispatch, no. 6, 21 December 1868. 104. PRO CO 273/40, 1266, SS, 198: 22 October 1870. 105. See PRO CO 273/55, 5297 SS, 474–503, May–June 1871, for details of the case. 106. PRO CO 273/55, 5297 SS, 485: Regarding evidence of convicts. 107. Ibid., 492–494: Regarding evidence of convicts. George Wendt was transported from Ceylon on a charge for forgery while working in a bank. He had first arrived in Melaka and was moved from there to Singapore as a third-class prisoner. By 1870 he had reached the first class and worked in the yard office as assistant to Mr. Neubronner. His ticket of leave was due that same year. 108. Ibid., 487. 109. PRO CO 273/45, 410: Minutes regarding loss of stores, 20 January 1871. 110. Gorman, “Regulation, Reform and Resistance,” in CoC, 105, 133, 136. 111. PRO CO 273/45, 385. Memorandum of deficiency. 112. PRO CO 273/55, 5297 SS, 484–494: Regarding evidence convicts. 113. PRO CO 273/68, SS (1873, no. 207), 147: Case of overseer Stuart, vol. IV, 12–31 July 1873. 114. PRO CO 273/55, 484–489: Regarding evidence of convicts. 115. Ibid, 487. 116. PRO CO 273 /51, 5297, SS, 502: Lord Kimberly, 7 June 1871. 117. PRO CO 273/ 68, SS (1873, no. 207), 142, 174, 184: Case of overseer Stuart, 8 September 1873. 118. Ibid., from Capt. Innes to Colonial Engineer, Singapore, 26 June 1873, 263. 119. Green, “Prison Discipline in Ceylon,” 177. 120. Brown, “A Commissioner Calls,” 296. 121. Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean, 37. 122. PRO CO 273/33 (1869, no. 19), 448: Govt. of India Home Dept (Judicial) to the Duke of Argyle K. J. Secretary of State for India, Simla, 10 June 1869. 123. Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, 723, July 1865. 124. PRO CO 273/3, coll. 18, 958–961: Jail fund, Superintendent of Convicts, July 1859. 125. Turnbull, The Straits Settlements, 208. 126. IOR F/4/2712, 194903, India Public, coll. no. 77, vol. 1, para 9, 4th quarterly

notes to pages 154–159

295

(1857, no. 33): 23 March 1857. Regarding civil rights of convicts. 127. Ibid., India Public, 194.904 (1857, no. 79), Straits coll. no. 77, public narrative for the first half of 1856, 20 July 1857. Examiner’s Office, regarding civil rights of convicts. 128. Ibid., no. 583. 129. Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean, 36–37. 130. Braithwaite, “Crime in a Convict Republic,” 20.

Chapter 6: The Battle for the City

1. Mak Lau Fong, The Sociology of Chinese Secret Societies; Trocki, Opium and Empire; Yeoh, Contesting Space. 2. Kaplan and Holloway, Segregation in Cities, 4. 3. Following several incidents leading up to the Indian mutiny of 1857 (discussed subsequently at length), Queen Victoria assumed government over India, promising religious freedom to her Indian subjects. See Proclamation by the Queen to the Princes, Chiefs, and the People of India, 1 November 1858, in A. Berriedale Keith, ed. Speeches and Documents on Indian Policy, 1750–1921, vol. I (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1922), 382–386. 4. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Trangression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986). 5. Ibid., 97. 6. In Rabelais and His World, M. M. Bakhtin studied the work of François Rabelais, a writer of the French Renaissance, exploring how the folk culture of the carnival can be used to critique the rationalist structures of Renaissance humanism. This idea is discussed by Bakhtin in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Towards a Historical Poetics,” in The Dialogic Imagination, 295. The chronotope is described as making narrative events concrete, concretizing representation, the primary means for materializing time in space. While the carnival may do this for ideological, cultural, and social expressions, the novel describing the carnival brings it into the world of the author and his or her audience. Ibid., 252. 7. Folch-Serra, “Place Voice Space: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dialogical Landscape,” 265. 8. In reference to Yeoh, Contesting Space. Yeoh uses the term to describe contestation over urban property in Chinatown during the 1880s. 9. Ibid., 219–220. 10. Ibid., 222. 11. H. T. Haughton, “Native Names of Streets in Singapore,” in Sheppard, Singapore 150 Years, 208–219. Cantonese and Hokkien meanings have been provided in personal communications by Lai Chee Kien. Lama in Malay means “former” and this may suggest that it was formerly the Boyan village. 12. In Hokkien: Boh Mua Lu Koi. Boh: “to rub,” “to squeeze,” Mua Lu: sesame

296

notes to pages 159–163

“essence”/oil, Koi: lane/road. 13. In Cantonese: Tai Ma Lo. Tai: big/great, Ma: horse, Lo: road (Ma Lo is usually taken to mean “street”). 14. See, Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, chap.11, 303–307. 15. For a detailed account of the two towns, see Lai Chee Kien, “Commercial Interests and Multicultural Enclaves.” 16. Dhoraisingam, Singapore’s Heritage: Through Places of Historical Interest, preface. 17. Haughton, “Native Names of Streets in Singapore,” 219. 18. In Cantonese: Kek Leng Kie Loi Pai Au. Kek Leng: “kling,” Kie: street, Loi Pai: literally “week,” refers to weekly worship, Au: back; Hokkien: Au Be Chia Lo. Au Be: at the back, Chia: vehicle, Lo: building. Courtesy Lai Chee Kien, 19. Haughton, “Native Names of Streets in Singapore,” 208. 20. Ibid., 209. 21. Lo Man Yuk, “Chinese Names of Streets in Penang,” 197–246. Penang Town Hall, Ang Mo Kong koan – European Club. Ibid., 227. 22. Penang Past and Present, 1786–1963, publication compiled by Penang Historical Society subcommittee (Penang: City Council of George Town, 1966), appendices. 23. Wilfred Blythe, The Impact of Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya: A Historical Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 43–44. 24. Mak Lau Fong, The Sociology of Chinese Secret Societies, 45. 25. Ibid., 46. 26. Mahani Musa, “Malays and the Red and White Flag Societies in Penang, 1830’s–1920’s,” JMBRAS LXXII, pt. 2 (1999): 158. 27. Helen Fujimoto, The South Indian Muslim Community and the Evolution of the Jawi Peranakan in Penang up to 1948 (Tokyo: ILCAA, Tokyo Gaikokugo Daigaku, 1988), 29. 28. Ibid., 21–23. Munshi Abdullah, whose paternal great-grandmother was a Tamil woman from Nagore, was said to have resembled and dressed like a Melaka Tamil, although his national sympathies were toward Malays. Jawi-Pekan is interpreted as Straits-born of Indian-Malay ethnicity. Pekan also means “town” in Malay and can be additionally interpreted as a shortening of Peranakan, a hybrid ethnic population. 29. Mak Lau Fong, The Sociology of Chinese Secret Societies, 96. 30. In Penang, the February 1859 riots were said to have been about a dispute over a woman, while the 28 October 1865 riots began over a fight in a brothel. 31. Mak Lau Fong, The Sociology of Chinese Secret Societies, 95. 32. M. L. Wynne cites the “Return of Chinese Clubs in May 1825,” in the SS Factory Records, vol. 101, 1825, 1604, compiled by the superintendent of police R. Caunter. They are: Church Street, Nghee Hung-Khoon, 468; Prangin Road, Who Sung Khoon, 147 members; Ujong Passir, Hoy San Khoon, 393; Prangin Road, Choong Chan Koon, 175; Prangin Road, Wye Chow-Koon, 160; King Street, Yan Who-koon, 17; King Street, Yeng

notes to pages 163–166

297

San Khoon, 16. See Mervyn Llewelyn Wynne, Triad and Tabut: A Survey of the Origin and Diffusion of Chinese and Mohamedan Secret Societies in the Malay Peninsula A.D, 1800–1935 (Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1941), 75. 33. Mak Lau Fong, The Sociology of Chinese Secret Societies, 81. 34. See Fujimoto, The South Indian Muslim Community, 36; Khoo Su Nin, Streets of George Town Penang. 35. Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, 505. 36. R. B. Krishnan, Indians in Malaya, 16; NL 148, W 49, 108, and 109. Representation from the Hindu inhabitants of Singapore on the reconviction of their priest, Kristnayah, pleading for his release. 37. Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof, “Lasting Charisma,” Pulau Penang 1, no. 2 (1989): 32–35. In an article on the saints and shrines in Pulau Pinang, Yousouf recounts a story that the saint was among road workers who protested against the severe beatings that were inflicted on him, and he was arrested. His miraculous escape from jail added to his reputation. The government gave him the site at Transfer Road, where a shrine was built for him soon after his death in 1840 by convict laborers, “whom he supernaturally protected from unjust treatment.” 38. NL 148, W49, item 1926: 7 and 11 January 1864, 26. 39. See Sidhu, Bhai Maharaj Singh: Martyr of the Sikh Faith; and Gandharab, The Early Pioneer Sikhs of Singapore, 2. 40. Jim Masselos, “Change and Custom in the Format of the Bombay Mohurrum during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 5, no. 2 (December 1982): 47–67. See also British Parliamentary Paper C4366, Correspondence Respecting Recent Coolie Disturbance in Trinidad at Mohurrum Festival, for example. 41. Wynne, Triad and Tabut. 42. Kerbala is in southern Iraq. 43. Vernon James Schubel, “Karbala as Sacred Space among North American Shi`ia ‘Every Day Is Ashura, Everywhere Is Karbala,’” in Barbara Daly Metcalf, ed., Making Muslim Space in Europe and America, 186–203, 187 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Muharram is a Shi`ia (Shi`i/Shi`ite Muslim) festival commemorating the death of prophet Muhammad’s grandson Husain. 44. Straits Times, 7 September 1852. Muharram commences on 15 October for ten days (however, this date changes according to the first sighting of the new moon). 45. Ann Marie Schimmel, “Islam in the Indian Subcontinent,” Handbuch der Orientalistik, Abt. II: Indien 4:3 (E. J. Brill/Leiden: Koln, 1980), 176–177. Taqiya was often practiced by Shi`ites in order to escape persecution and can be described as impersonation or hiding one’s faith during times of danger. Marthiya originally developed as a dirge for Husain invented in the Deccan in eighteenth-century Delhi. The songwriters found consolation in weeping for the sufferings of the Prophet’s family while they

298

notes to pages 166–169

themselves were smarting under foreign rule. 46. J. D. Vaughan, “Notes on the Malays of Penang and Province Wellesley,” Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia, New Series 2, no. 2 (1857): 115–175. 47. Ghulam Sarwar Yousouf, “The Malay Performing Arts of Penang,” Penang Past and Present (April 2000): 17–18. 48. A. W. Hamilton, “The Boria,” JSBRAS 82 (1920): 139. 49. Fujimoto, The South Indian Muslim Community, 174–176. 50. The love story of Leili and Majun was best known as one of five poems in Khamse (pentalogue) by the twelfth-century Sufi poet Nizami Ganjavi, from Azerbaijan. However, it is believed to have existed in the pre-Islamic oral tradition. The story is equivalent to Romeo and Juliet. According to Wynne, Triad and Tabut, 178, the Madjun in India are said to be possessed and dance a whirling dance. 51. M. L. Wynne, a Penang police officer who in 1941 studied the history of the festival in detail, described the participants as a combination of religious and profane characters. Wynne, Triad and Tabut, chap. XII. 52. Hamilton, “The Boria,” 141. 53. During the First World War, Albania was occupied by Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy (1917–1920). In 1920 the Paris conference offered Albania its sovereignty and the new government instigated peasants to harass Italian forces. In September 1920, after a siege of Italian-occupied Vlorë by Albanian forces, they won their freedom. 54. Wynne, Triad and Tabut, 195–197, discusses the topic of the Koli Kallen in an attack on the Boria by Mohamed Yussoff bin Sultan Maidin, chief clerk of the education office in Penang, titled “Boria dan-Benchana-nya,” translated as “The Evil Influence of the Boria,” Penang, 1922. 55. Masselos, “Change and Custom in the Format of the Bombay Mohurrum,” 57. 56. Ibid., 54. 57. Ibid., 48, in reference to L. M. Fruzetti and A. R. Saiyid. He also cites R. K. Trivedi and G. E. von Grunebaum. 58. Wynne, Triad and Tabut, 154–157, 162. The proscription of this sect following suicidal assassinations of Sunni rulers caused the sectarian rift in Islam and the marginalization of Shi`ism. The Malays, who were Sunni Muslims, were forbidden from practicing Shi`ite Islam and from participating in the Muharram festival. 59. Amin Maalouf, in The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, trans. Jon Rothschild (New York: Shocken Books, 1984), 22–23, gives a description of the origin of the Assassins sect. 60. Wynne, Triad and Tabut; Leon Comber, An Introduction to Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya (Singapore: Donald Moore, 1957), chap. 1; and Leon Comber, Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya: A Survey of Triad Societies from 1800 to 1900 (New York: J. J. Augustin Inc., 1959). According to colonial sources the triads trace their origin to the burning of the Shao Lin monastery during the time of the Emperor K’ang Hsi (1662–

notes to pages 169–172

299

1723), the second ruler of the Manchu dynasty. Five monks who survived the catastrophe sought refuge with a renegade minister Ch’en Chin Nan in a small temple, the Red Flower Pavilion, and formed the Hung League. Their motto was “Overthrow the Ch’ing and restore the Ming,” which is invoked in secret society rituals (Comber observes that the Manchu dynasty (Ch’ing) were foreign overlords whereas the Ming were mainly Chinese). However, the Hung League’s attempt to overthrow the imperial army was not successful, so they dispersed and formed five Grand Lodges bearing the insignias of the five monks. Their objective was to find new recruits for their cause. 61. Comber, Chinese Secret Societies, 8, 127. 62. Blythe, The Impact of Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya, chap. 2, 14–35. 63. Abdullah, The Hikayat, 183–190. Hoey or huey as it is noted in this translation stands for the clan society and is sometimes interchangeable with kongsi, another name for the institution. 64. Abdullah, The Hikayat, 191–192. 65. See Irene Lim, Secret Societies in Singapore (Singapore: Singapore History Museum, 1999), published after the exhibition Entering the Hung Gate: The History of Chinese Secret Societies in Singapore, Singapore History Museum, November 1997; see also Comber, An Introduction, 8–9. 66. Mak Lau Fong, The Sociology of Chinese Secret Societies, appendix VI, verse 25, 154. Poems of the Hung Societies of Peninsular Malaysia. 67. Ibid., chap. 4, 40–41. 68. Comber, An Introduction, 9. 69. Comber, Chinese Secret Societies, 105–106. 70. Ibid., 1. 71. Trocki, Opium and Empire, 45. 72. Ibid., 41. 73. Ibid., 45. 74. Mak Lau Fong, The Sociology of Chinese Secret Societies, 46–54; and Michael Godley, Mandarin-Capitalists from Nanyang: Overseas Chinese Enterprise in the Modernization of China, 1893–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 27. 75. See Trocki, Opium and Empire, 41 fn 13. 76. Ibid., 37. 77. Ibid. 78. Comber, Chinese Secret Societies, 37, refers to an article by Lt T. J. Newbold and Major General F. W. Wilson on “The Chinese Secret Triad Society of the Tien-ti-huih.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society VI (1841): 120–158. 79. Comber, Chinese Secret Societies, 41. 80. Ibid., 42, based on J. D. Vaughan, “Notes on the Chinese of Pinang,” Journal of the Indian Archipelago (JIA) VIII (1854): 1–27. 81. PRO CO 273/6 (1858, no. 113), 235: Blundell to C. Beadon, Secretary to the

300

notes to pages 173–175

Govt. of India, Singapore, 4 September 1858. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid. 84. Moore and Moore, The First Hundred and Fifty Years of Singapore, 271. 85. PRO CO 273/3, coll. 9, 421: Outbreak of violence among Chinese in Penang, February 1859; PRO CO 273/9 (1865, no. 78), 426: Commissioner of Police, PWI to Col. Man, Resident Councilor PWI, 7 December 1865. Affray between Chinese hoeys in Penang. 86. PRO CO 273/9 (1865, no. 78), 426–427. According to the leading Chinese merchants the punishment given to rioters by British courts was “utterly inadequate.” 87. Sharon Carstens, Histories, Cultures, Identities: Studies in Malaysian Chinese Worlds (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005; reprint, 2006). 88. Ibid., 65. In reference to Judith Nagata, “Perceptions of Social Inequality in Malaysia,” in Nagata, Contributions to Asian Studies, vol. VII (1975), 117. 89. PRO CO 273/3, 937: Acting Resident Councilor Melaka to Blundell, 19 May 1859. 90. Ibid. Syed Hussein, a native of Kedah residing near Telok Ayer Tawar, created a “congsee” of several hundred followers. Disturbances in 1859 and 1865 were attributed to Muslim kongsis. 91. CO 273/3, 421: Outbreak of violence among Chinese in Penang, February 1859. It was reported that since last Muharram the “Mohamedans” had been split into two cliques, one of which included members of the Hosing society. They would meet with Malays and Klings in a house set apart for this purpose. 92. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, 307. 93. Blythe, The Impact of Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya, 103. 94. Comber, Chinese Secret Societies, 121. 95. NL 1100/4492: Report of the Commission appointed under Act XXI of 1867 to enquire into the Penang Riots (Singapore Govt. Press, 1868), 205; PRO CO 273/11, 9600, SS, 268: Governor to Duke of Newcastle, 19 August 1867. 96. Comber, Chinese Secret Societies, 108. 97. PRO CO 273/6, 235: Blundell to C. Beadon, 4 September 1858. 98. Comber, Chinese Secret Societies, 128, from Report upon the Secret Societies by F. S. Brown, laid before the Straits Settlements Legislative Council on 28 August 1869. 99. See Khoo Khay Kim, “Malaysia: Immigration and the Growth of a Plural Society”; and Musa, “Malays and the Red and White Flag Societies in Penang,” 151–182. 100. Blythe, The Impact of Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya, 130. 101. Musa, “Malays and the Red and White Flag Societies in Penang,” 153–155, notes that the statistics for 1860 were as follows: Malays, 3,792; Chinese, 16,928; Indian, 7,310. 102. Ibid., 164–167. 103. Ibid., 161.

notes to pages 175–181

301

104. Ibid., 154. 105. Mak Lau Fong, The Sociology of Chinese Secret Societies, 124. 106. PRO CO 273/21, 161: Report on the Inquiry into the Penang Riots, 1868. 107. Ibid., 165, 443, 585, 645, 706. In 1852 during Muharram, the convict procession collided with the police and provoked a discussion regarding its prohibition; NL 152, X2, 1852, 297–299. 108. IOR F/4/2604, 163263, India Public, SS coll. 20 (1854, no. 103), 28 October 1854. 109. Ibid. 110. Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, 531; NL 10590, Singapore Free Press, 3 September 1857. 111. NL 10590, Singapore Free Press, 3 September 1857. “Taboot,” as the Free Press uses it, is a reference to the tabut, the tazia or ritual casket carried in the procession. 112. Ibid. 113. Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, 531. 114. IOR F/4/2712, 194923, India Public, coll. 91, vol. 1, para 33 (1857, no. 33): Correspondence between Governor, Commanding Officer, and the officiating Superintendent, 23 March 1857. 115. Ibid. 116. PRO CO 273/5, 248: Regulations for public processions and assemblies in conformity with section 77 of Act XVIII of 1856, PWI, 8 March 1860. 117. Ibid. 118. Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, 531. 119. See Saul David, The Indian Mutiny 1857 (London: Viking, 2002; reprint, London: Penguin Books, 2003). 120. Anderson, “Sepoys, Servants and Settlers,” in CoC, 205. See also Clare Anderson, The Indian Uprising of 1857-8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion (London: Anthem, 2007). 121. Blundell to Secretary to Government of India Fort William, Singapore, 28 August 1857, in Moore and Moore, The First Hundred and Fifty Years of Singapore, 307. 122. Ibid. 123. PRO CO 273/16, 114: Petition from European inhabitants of Singapore, presented at the House of Commons, 1858. 124. Ibid. 125. IOR NL 2205, Singapore Free Press, 13 May 1858. 126. PRO CO 273/16, 114. 127. Ibid., 113–114. 128. Ibid. 129. McNair, PTOW, 95. 130. PRO CO 273/10, 3075, SS, 36: Public Works. Report on the progress of the SS

302

notes to pages 181–185

from 1859–1860 to 1866–1867, 28 March 1867; PRO CO 273/22, SS (1869), 379: Colonial estimates and civil works. By 1860 the central police station (magistrates court and court of requests) presided over Chinatown, while police stations and lockups at Tulloh Btangeh, Passir Panjang, Tanjong Karrang, Kranji, Selitar, Changi and Serangoon Road, Kampong Gelam and the Kendang Kerbau (1869), and Rumah Miskin stations (all built in this same period) controlled the country districts. 131. Turnbull, The Straits Settlements, 42. 132. IOR NL 148, W49, Item 1926, 7 and 11 January, 1864, 26. 133. Singapore Free Press, 26 October 1865. 134. Singapore Free Press, 23 November 1865. 135. Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, 723. 136. Singapore Free Press, 26 October 1865, signed by 250 petitioners from the Tamil community. 137. Ibid., 19 October 1865. 138. Ibid., 12 October 1865. 139. Yeoh Seng Chan, octogenarian, interview by Khoo Su Nin, circa 1992; Khoo Su Nin, “The Acheen Street Community: A Melting Pot of the Malay World,” Pulau Pinang 2, no. 2 (January 1990): 22. 140. The affiliation between the Hokkien and the Achenese community, which had been established for trade with Acheh, continued even after the death of Che Long when Sayed Alatas, a supporter of the Achenese rebels, married Khoo Poh’s daughter. See Khoo Su Nin, Streets of George Town Penang, 35. 141. PRO CO 273/11, 9600, SS, 268: 19 August 1867. 142. PRO CO 273/13, SS (1867, no. 143), 95: Governor to Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, 7 December 1867. 143. Ibid. 144. Khoo Su Nin, “The Acheen Street Community: A Melting Pot of the Malay World,” 20. 145. PRO CO 273/11, 268. 146. Ibid. 147. Ibid., The commission appointed under Act no. XXI of 1867 was composed of four Europeans and four “natives” of Chinese and Malay communities (Lawrence Nairne, Walter Scott, Bernard Rodyk, James Lamb, Foo Tye Sin, Lee Phee Chuan, Nina Merican Noordin, Ong Attye). 148. PRO CO 273 /21, 161: Report on the Penang riots. 149. PRO CO 273/18, 104–105: Criminal sessions, Penang, September and November 1867; and PRO CO 273/26, 267–343: Report on the Penang riots, appendix no.16. Agreement B in Tamil produced as evidence before the commission was signed in Malay by Haji Mohamad Nor, Omar son of Abdul Rasool, Abdul Carims Mark, Meyah’s Mark and Syboo; and in Tamil by Kather Bagoos. Witnesses M. T. Doral, Pah

notes to pages 185–188

303

Etam, Cather Mydin Merican. 150. Fujimoto, The South Indian Muslim Community, 174. 151. PRO CO 273/11, 9600, SS, 267–268. 152. Khoo Thean Teik later established himself as a prosperous businessman and plantation owner. In 1868 the government considered a mitigation of sentences after eighteen months. Wynne, Triad and Tabut, 248, see also footnotes. 153. PRO CO 273/26, 1141 SS, 55: Govt. House, Penang to Duke of Newcastle, 6 June 1868. When a rioter named Ahmad was charged with arson, it caused thirty Muslim traders to leave the island. 154. PRO CO 273/35, 330, 12304 SS, from Magistrate of Singapore, Sir T. Sanford, on Chinese Secret Societies. 155. PRO CO 273/12, 29: Act XX of 1867, Attorney General’s Office, Singapore to Governor SS, 24 August 1867, section 13 and 14. 156. PRO CO 273/50, 11154, SS, 165, 170: Government of Singapore to Earl of Kimberley. 157. PRO CO 273/65, 98: Report of the commission appointed to report on the riots of October 1872. 158. Ibid. For example, troops were stationed at the Chartered Mercantile Bank, Scotts Tavern, South Bridge Road, and the Chinese Theatre close to Ellenborough market. The rest of the troops would remain at the central station. 159. Folch-Serra, “Place Voice Space: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dialogical Landscape,” 265. 160. After 1860, emigration from China was legalized. Increases in the numbers of Chinese migrants suggested a very different future from that of India. 161. PRO CO 273/3, 9: Political Department, Lord Stanley to Governor General of India in Council, 1 March 1859 (no. 7). During the initial post-mutiny arguments for transfer it was argued that since the East India Company no longer had trading privileges, the dependency, i.e., the Straits, was unnecessary. Moreover, it was closely connected with China and Hong Kong after Lord Elgin’s treaty. It was recommended that the settlements be treated as colonial dependencies distinct from India and officials with knowledge of the Chinese be selected to administer Singapore. These recommendations were revisited in 1867. 162. Yeoh, Contesting Space, 252, from Straits Times, 22 February 1888; PRO CO 273/ 151, 5839, Smith to Holland, 27 February 1888; and from Straits Times, 24 February 1888.

Chapter 7: The Citadel

1. Mak Lau Fong, The Sociology of Chinese Secret Societies, 56. 2. Ibid., 106.

304

notes to pages 188–191

3. Musa, “Malays and the Red and White Flag Societies in Penang,” 168. 4. Barbara Babcock, The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 29, 32. 5. PRO CO 273/60: Mr. Shelford, Singapore, 27 June 1872, 457. 6. This phrase is attributed to Sir Edmund du Cane, chairman of the 1878 prison commission. 7. See Leon Radzinowicz, “The Evolution of the Modern English Prison System,” The Modern Law Review 3, no. 2 (October 1939): 121–135. 8. PRO CO 273/71, 27: Departure of Ord, Legislative Council, 31 October 1873. A review of the progress of the settlement since 1867. 9. Moses Finlay, tracing the historical shifts in the meaning of the term “colony,” observes that in seventeenth-century English it was equated with plantation. Finlay’s position is discussed by Anthony King, “Rethinking Colonialism,” in Al Sayyad, Forms of Dominance, chap. 14, 349. 10. In social history, Indian labor in Singapore and Malaysia is discussed under two categories, which account for labor since the 1870s. They are plantation workers, originally indentured to work in coffee, sugar, and rubber plantations in rural Malaysia, and urban workers, often used in urban construction. See Kernial Singh Sandhu, “Some Preliminary Observations of the Origins and Characteristics of Indian Migration to Malaya, 1786–1957,” in K. G. Tregonning, ed., Papers on Malayan History, from papers submitted to the First International Conference of Southeast Asian Historians, Singapore, January 1961, Journal of Southeast Asian History (1962); Chinese indentured labor is more likely to be discussed in connection with the tin mining industry. For a detailed account of labor in Malaysia, see Parmer, Colonial Labour Policy and Administration. The most recent addition to work on this subject is Shanthini Pillai, Colonial Visions: Postcolonial Revisions, Images of the Indian Diaspora in Malaysia (Newcastleupon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). 11. PRO CO 273/40 (1870), 214: Petition to Government from residents of Prince of Wales Island and Province Wellesley. The first voluntary migrants had crossed over to the Straits from India from the 1830s onwards to work on sugar, spice, tapioca, and coconut plantations in Penang and Province Wellesley. They typically embarked at ports such as Nagapatnam, Nagore, or Karikal seeking jobs as boatmen, caulkers, laborers, syces, watermen, hawkers, or domestic servants. 12. Until the Indian Act of 1864, the emigration of Indian labor had not been regulated by law. Once the Straits Settlements became a British crown colony this act was replaced by the Act of 1871 and modified by the Act of 1872. 13. Paul Casperz, “Plantation: Past, Contemporary and Future, Patterns,” paper read at “‘Development from a People’s Perspective’ Solidarity Action in Development,” seminar, Kandy, Sri Lanka, 16–23 November 1986 (unpublished). 14. Ibid., 9, “If the wages paid on the plantation had been higher than those in

notes to pages 192–195

305

surrounding peasant agriculture or petty commodity production, two consequences would have followed, an increase in wages outside the plantation and the introduction of the labor saving technologies on the plantation. Plantation wages would have been higher than elsewhere if the plantation system was genuinely capitalist but it was not.” 15. PRO CO 273/71, SS (1873, no. 397), 452: Singapore 25 December 1873. 16. PRO CO 273/45, Madras Public (1870, no. 249), 280: H. J. Stokes, Acting Sub Collector to the Collector of Tanjore, Nagapatnam to Colonial Secretary, Singapore, 21 June 1870. 17. PRO CO 273/71, SS (1873, no. 397), 15, 452, 466: Describes cases of death by flogging. 18. Singapore Free Press, 8 October 1935. 19. PRO CO 273/28, 30: McNair to Col. Secretary SS, Singapore, 28 February 1869. Transportation from Hong Kong stopped in 1856. 20. PRO CO 273/61, 12041 SS, 330–376; NL 91, 2839: 3, 269 and enclosure. 21. Arnold, “India: The Contested Prison,” in CoC, 168. 22. NL 1100/4492, 52, Appendix 16, 20 June 1870. Papers laid before Legislative Council. Return of number of convicts, effective and non-effective in the SS. 23. Saw Chu-thong, Transported Indian Convicts in Singapore, 1825–1873, 43. 24. PRO CO 273/2 (1858, no. 550), 145: Resident Councilor PWI to E. A. Blundell, 8 December 1858. The results of the election of municipal commissioners for 1859. 25. Yeoh, Contesting Space. 26. PRO CO 273/16 (1858), 128: The PWD was organized as a separate department and placed under the chief engineer. 27. PRO CO 273/2 (1858, no. 16), 6: PWD, Military, 23 August 1858. 28. Murfett, et al. Between Two Oceans, 58, 62; Trocki, Prince of Pirates. 29. Murfett, et al. Between Two Oceans, 69–71. 30. Ibid., 73–74. 31. Ibid., 76–77. 32. PRO CO 273/58, 100, SS (22 July 1872), 259: Census Returns. Ord to Earl of Kimberley, 2 April 1871. Total population: 308,097; Chinese: female to males at a ratio of 1:5. Total Chinese population in Singapore being 54,572; Convicts: Indian, 1,571 and local, 330 in Singapore; PRO CO 273/2, 18: Blundell, PWI to Secretary to Govt. of India, April 1856. 33. PRO CO 273/2, 58: Captain Collyer, Singapore, 11 February 1858. Lai Chee Kien, “Commercial Interests and Multicultural Enclaves,” 13, describes Siao Bo or Small Town connected to the Big Town Da Bo by North Bridge and South Bridge Roads at the turn of the nineteenth century. He observes that while Big Town was inhabited by Hokkien, Teochow, and Cantonese, Small Town was settled by others. The Hainanese, the Hakka, followed by Hokchia, Foochow, and Henghua settled in this area

306

notes to pages 195–199

along with other Indian, Malay, and Chinese groups. 34. PRO CO 273/35, 12304, SS, 330: Magistrate of Singapore, Sir T. Sanford, on Chinese Secret Societies. 35. PRO CO 273/2, 18: PW Military. Definitive works, citadel and place of refuge, 23 August 1858. 36. Ibid., 29. 37. PRO CO 273/2: PW, Military, 23 August 1858 (no. 16). 38. Ibid., 6. Observations by Captain Collyer. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., no. 18, 4–8. 42. Ibid. 43. PRO CO 273/2, 46: Secretary to the Government of India Dept PWD, McNair, Present Officiating Engineer, letter no. 5965, 14 December 1857. 44. Ibid. 45. Golundauze was an elite corps in the military. 46. PRO CO 273/2, 58. McNair, letter no. 5965, outlining the local corps necessary for defenses. 47. PRO CO 273/5, 210, coll. 21, Singapore. 48. PRO CO 273/2, 58: Capt. Collyer, Singapore, 11 February 1858; PRO CO 273/2 (1859, no. 209), 430: Government of India, Home Dept, R. B. Chapman esq., Under Secretary to Govt. of India to E. A. Blundell, Governor of SS, 1 February 1859. Sale of arms to hostile powers: muskets, iron guns, gunpowder to China, Siam, Macassar, Solo, Bangkok, Manila, Calcutta, Pontianak. 49. PRO CO 273/3, McNair, letter no. 5965, 53. 50. Ibid. 51. PRO CO 273/2, 81: Allahabad, PWD, Military, Capt. Collyer, “Report on the Land Defenses of Singapore,” 10 October 1858 (no. 7). 52. Penang Gazette, 6 February 1869. The polarization of the government and the native population after the 1867 riots is evident in Colonel Anson’s threat that unless all those living on Beach Street without titles to their properties removed themselves, he would blow up their houses with gunpowder. 53. PRO CO 273/2, 35: Dept. of Public Works, Singapore, 4 February 1858. 54. PRO CO 273/2, 53: McNair, letter no. 5965. 55. PRO CO 273/2, 29: Blundell to Secretary of Government, Fort William, Singapore, 16 February 1858. 56. PRO CO 273/2, 85: “Report on the Land Defences of Singapore.” 57. Ibid. 58. PRO CO 273/2, 42: McNair, letter no. 5965. 59. PRO CO 273/2, 73: Blundell to Secretary of Government, Fort William, 26 July

notes to pages 199–201

307

1858. Blundell writes, “Sufficient to overawe the town and provide refuge.” 60. PRO CO 273/3 (1858, no. 582), 175–176: To Staff Officer, troops, SS, 18 November 1858; PRO CO 273/3, 178: Officer commanding troops to Governor SS, 4 December 1858. 61. PRO CO 273/2, 71: Collyer to Secretary to Govt. of India, re. Battery at entrance to New Harbor, 23 July 1858; PRO CO 273/2, 73: Blundell to Secretary to Govt. of India, Fort William, 26 July 1858; PRO CO 273/2, 5: PW Military, 23 August 1858 (no. 16). 62. Gorman, “Regulation, Reform and Resistance,” in CoC, 133–134. 63. Yang, “Disciplining ‘Natives’: Prisons and Prisoners in Early Nineteenth Century Colonial India”; Arnold, “India: The Contested Prison,” in CoC, 163–164. 64. Escapes: PRO CO 273/3, coll. 7 (February 1859, nos. 85 and 86), 418: Escape of two Madras convicts from a gang of twenty-five men employed in carrying timber and clearing the hill road from Ralow to Balli Pulao; PRO CO 273/3, coll. 35 (March 1859), 440: According to circular 13 May 1852 (no. 1019); PRO CO 273/3 (General Dept 2nd Quarter 1859, no. 125): Re. Escape at Sepoy lines, 29 April 1859; PRO CO 273/4 (1859, no. 67), 270: Superintendent of Convicts, Singapore to Secretary to Govt. SS, Singapore, 9 May 1859. Escape of Burmese convicts. 65. McNair, PTOW, 123–125. 66. PRO CO 273/79, 189: Report on the Outbreak in the Criminal Prison on 13 February 1875, Allan Skinner, Inspector of Prisons, 15 February 1875; Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years, 183. 67. PRO CO 273/79, 189: Report on the Outbreak in the Criminal Prison. 68. Ibid., 190. 69. Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years, 183. Mrs. Lamb, the wife of the jailer, secured the inner gate from the outside and then defended the gate with a long sword. She slashed and cut at the feet and legs at the bottom of the gateway and prevented escapes through the gate. 70. PRO CO 273/79, 192: Report on the Outbreak in the Criminal Prison. 71. Ibid., 195. 72. Ibid., 203. The prisoners who participated in the escape were originally convicted of piracy, rioting, or gang robbery. The six incidents over the previous six months included attacks on warder and on a jailer (by Selangore pirates of 1871), a plot among the life convicts, death of a prisoner in the sleeping ward, stabbing of a warder, and two escapes. See Isabella Bird, The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1883), Letter XVI, for a description of the crime, from http://ebooks. adelaide.edu.au/b/bird/isabella/golden/ (accessed on 31 January 2008). 73. PRO CO 273/79, 189. 74. Ibid., 199, Copy of Telegram sent on 15 February 1875. 75. PRO CO 273/31, 470: Extract from Government Gazette of 12 November 1868.

308

notes to pages 201–204

76. Ibid. 77. PRO CO 273/60, 434: Report on the Prisons in the SS, 28 September 1872, appendix A; PRO CO 273/55, 11006, SS, 268: Convicts from Melaka and Penang to be brought to Singapore, 6 November 1871; PRO CO273/61, 136: Replacements to peons and orderlies necessary on transfer; 273/66, 24: All transmarines leave in six weeks, 3 April 1873; PRO CO 273/72, 368: Pardon to TOLs who have not committed heinous crimes, 21 April 1873; PRO CO 273/73, 371: Military guard for convicts sent to Andamans or India, 26 April 1873. 78. PRO CO 273/60, 439. 79. The Prison Act of 1877 by the prison commission headed by Edmund du Cane amalgamated British prisons under the Home Office. 80. PRO CO 273/31, 467 and 469: Rules and Regulations for Prisons under Prison Ordinance no. XI of 1868; PRO CO 273/60, 432: Papers laid before the Legislative Council, 10 October 1872, 432; PRO CO 273/60, 436: Report of the Commission on Prison Discipline, 4 June 1872. 81. PRO CO 273/60, 438, 442. 82. Ibid., 434. 83. Ibid., 433. 84. PRO CO 273/60, 445, Appendix F. 85. PRO CO 273/19, 7434, SS (1868, no. 28), 66, 102: Governor to Duke of Buckingham, 2 June 1868, in response to the 19 August 1863 circular from Downing Street. Report of the commissioner appointed to enquire into the operation of the acts relating to transportation and penal servitude in reference to the committee of the House of Lords on prison discipline. 86. PRO CO 273/60, 434: Report on the prisons in the SS, 28 September 1872. 87. Ibid., 436, 437–438. 88. Ibid., 438. 89. PRO CO 273/60, 436. 90. PRO CO 273/71 (1873, no. 375), 168: Proceeding of the board of medical officers, Singapore, 28 November 1873. 91. PRO CO 273/60, 441: McNair, 1 January 1871. 92. Ibid., 438, item 45. 93. Ibid., 439, item 46. 94. PRO CO 273/60, 440–441: McNair. 95. Ibid., 439: T. Braddell, W. H. Read. 96. PRO CO 273/44, 538–560: McNair to Colonial Secretary, Singapore, 1 January 1871. 97. PRO CO 273/60, 441, McNair. 98. McNair, PTOW, 149–150. The mortality rate for 1878–1879 was 16.20 percent to 20.63 percent.

notes to pages 204–209

309

99. SSADR 1885 (enclosed in SSGG, 19 February 1886, 182). 100. Arnold, “India: The Contested Prison,” in CoC, 166. 101. Ibid., 166–167. 102. Ibid., 156. 103. Arnold, “The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge and Penology in 19th Century India,” 166, 167. 104. PRO CO273/71 (1873, no. 375), 168: Proceedings of the Board of Medical Officers, 28 November 1873. 105. Brown, “A Commissioner Calls.” 106. Ibid., 294, 296. Brown notes that by the mid-1910s the average daily inmate population in Burma was just under 140 per 100,000, compared to 50 or 30, respectively, in the United Provinces and Bengal. Burma was sending 20,000 men to prison every year. 107. Ibid., 297–299. 108. Makepeace, Brooke, and Braddell, One Hundred Years of Singapore, vol. 1, 289. 109. PRO CO 700/SS, Criminal Prison, Singapore 1881. 110. Report on the Blue Book for 1887, 12–13. In 1887 the magistrate at Province Wellesley, the most rural part of the settlements, tried 1,974 Tamil coolies for offenses under the immigration ordinance. (The total number of cases tried that year was 4,817.) Out of 3,085 persons committed to the criminal prison that year, 967 were Tamil coolies. 111. Makepeace, Brooke, and Braddell, One Hundred Years of Singapore, vol. 1, 289–290. 112. PRO CO 273/25, 12135, SS, 73: Proposal to turn H. M. Gaol in Melaka into a Government House, 31 October 1868. 113. PRO CO 273/11, 8952, SS, 118: Government House, Singapore, 3 August 1867; McNair PTOW, 101. 114. McNair, PTOW, 101. 115. PRO CO 273/27, 278, SS, 27 February 1869. See also papers laid before the Legislative Council 17 February 1869, 314. 116. Ibid. 117. PRO CO 273/11, 8952, SS, 118: Govt. House, Singapore, 3 August 1867. 118. Ibid., 125. 119. Yeoh, Contesting Space, 35; G. E. Bogaars, “The Effect of Opening the Suez Canal on the Trade and Development of Singapore,” in Sheppard, Singapore 150 Years, 220–264. 120. PRO CO 273/11, 125. 121. Ibid. 122. Lim, Transforming Traditions: Architecture in ASEAN Countries, 178. 123. IOR NL 1100, 4492, 116.

310

notes to pages 209–215

124. McNair, PTOW, 104. 125. IOR NL 1976, Singapore Free Press, 4 October 1884. Account on Major J. F. A. McNair. 126. PRO CO 273/11, 125. 127. Ibid. 128. Ibid. 129. McNair, PTOW, 102–103. 130. CO 273/22, 296 SS, 524: Minute, 20 November 1868. Furniture for cost of £652-10-4. 131. Ibid. 132. Makepeace, Brooke, and Braddell, One Hundred Years of Singapore, vol. 2, 491. “Admiral Keppel recounts how on going up to Government House he saw a gardener quietly working in the grounds with murder on his forehead.” A syce is the equivalent of a hostler or stable boy. 133. PRO CO 273/28 (1869), 466: To Editor of Star, in reference to PRO CO 273/28 (1869), 457; “The Straits Settlements or how to govern a colony by a Singapore merchant,” pamphlet (London A. H. Bailey and Co., 3 Royal Exchange Buildings 1869, cost sixpence). 134. PRO CO 273/43, 123: The London and China Telegraph, 7 February 1870. 135. PRO CO 273/43, 3698: Straits Settlements Association of London, 6 April 1870, 162–163, in reference to an article in the Straits Observer, 20 August 1869, discussed in PRO CO 273/43, 123. 136. PRO CO 273/43, 170: Straits Observer, 8 February 1870. 137. Ibid., 171. 138. PRO CO 273/24, 1360, SS, 185: Minutes of Straits Association, 31 January 1868. 139. IOR NL 1976, Singapore Free Press, 4 October 1884. Account on Major J. F. A. McNair. 140. Ron Wise, World Paper Money Homepage, http://aes.iupui.edu/rwise /countries/singapore.html (accessed 11 December 2002). 141. K. K. Seet, The Istana (Singapore: Times Editions, 2000), 109. 142. Lai Chee Kien, “Commercial Interests and Multicultural Enclaves,” notes that gambier farming employed shifting cultivation and the land once cleared was then available for settlement by Europeans. 143. Lim, Transforming Traditions: Architecture in the ASEAN Countries, 165. Sae Por, “Little Town,” developed adjacent to Kampong Gelam during the late nineteenth century. Lai Chee Kien, “Commercial Interests and Multicultural Enclaves,” 13, notes that maps in B. W. Hodder, “Racial Groupings in Singapore,” fig. 5 on p. 31 and fig. 7 on p. 35, indicate the second Chinatown as recorded in 1950. 144. PRO CO 273/45, 279: From H. J. Stokes esq. Acting Sub Collector to the Collector, Tanjore, Nagapatnam, 21 June 1870 (no. 249).

notes to pages 215–223

311

145. In later years the Indian population was augmented by public servants working in railways, schools, and hospitals, but this was not true of the early period. 146. Sqn. Ldr. H. A. Probert, The History of Changi (Changi Prison Press, 1965), 52. 147. Ibid. There is a rich literature on POW experience in Changi, the most recent being R. P. W. Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience (London: Routledge, Curzon, 2003).

Chapter 8: Conclusion

1. See Amnesty International Report, ASA 36/001/2004, “Singapore, the Death Penalty: A Hidden Toll of Executions,” http://www.amnesty.org/en/alfresco_asset/ ac5ac24e-a509-11dc-a92d-271514ed133d/asa360012004en.pdf (accessed 31 January 2008). 2. For a discussion of guest workers as a category, see Gershan Shafir, ed., The Citizenship Debates (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 3. See Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 16–17. 4. Khoo Khay Kim, “Malaysia: Immigration and the Growth of a Plural Society,” 20. 5. Ibid., 25. 6. Dhoraisingam, Peranakan Indians of Singapore and Melaka, 19, mentions Dalhousie Lane, Kampong Kapor, Kinta Road, Chitty Road, Rowell Road, Serangoon Road (near Jalan Besar), Bencoolen Street, and Selegie Road. 7. Joel Kahn, Other Malays: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World, ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2006), chap. 1. 8. Judith Nagata, “Perceptions of Social Inequality in Malaysia,” in Nagata, Contributions to Asian Studies, 1975, vol. VII, 117, in reference to Cynthia Enloe, “Issues and Integration in Malaysia,” Pacific Affairs 41 (1968–1969): 372–385. 9. Nagata, “Perceptions of Social Inequality in Malaysia,” 120. 10. Hefner, The Politics of Multiculturalism, 6. 11. See Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). 12. Robert Blauner, “Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt,” Social Problems 16, no. 4 (1969): 393–408; Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). 13. Goh, Contours of Culture. 14. Ibid., 8. 15. See Jacobs, Edge of Empire, introduction. 16. Kaplan and Holloway, Segregation in Cities, 29. 17. See Nihal Perera, Society and Space: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Postcolonial Identity in Sri Lanka (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998).

312

notes to pages 223–226

18. See “Globalization and the Ethnic Division in European Cities,” special issue of Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS) 22, no. 4 (October 1997). 19. Zafar Anjum, “Indians Roar in the Lion City,” Little India, 10 November 2007, www.littleindia.com/news/123/ARTICLE/1267/2005-11-12.html (accessed 11 November 2007). 20. “Foreign Workers Outnumber Indian Community,” posted by Poobalan at BornInMalaysia, Indian, 13 August 2007, http://poobalan.com/blog/borninmalaysia /2007/08/13/foreign-workers-outnumber-indian-community/ (accessed 11 November 2007), based on an article in Berita Harian by Oleh Azrul Affandi Sobry. 21. “Indian Expats: How Separate Are They?” Straits Times, 25 March 2007. 22. Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh, “Shifting Imaginaries: Decolonization, Internal Colonization, Postcoloniality,” in Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh, eds., The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power, chap. 1, 11 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books, 1995). 23. Ibid., 9. 24. Geraldine Heng and Janadas Devan, “State Fatherhood: The Politics of Nationalism, Sexuality and Race in Singapore,” in Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz, eds., Bewitching Women Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia, chap. 6 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 25. G. E. Bogaars, “The Effect of Opening the Suez Canal on the Trade and Development of Singapore,” in Sheppard, Singapore 150 Years, 246. 26. Goh, Contours of Culture, 47. 27. Ibid., 50. 28. According to the Census 2000, the distribution of population according to housing type in 2000 was as follows: public housing (HDB) 88 percent, condominiums and private flats 6.0 percent, private houses 5.1 percent. The remaining 0.9 percent lived in shophouses, other private flats, and attap/zinc-roofed houses and others. Singapore Dept. of Statistics, May 2001, 17, http://www.singstat.gov.sg /keystats/c2000/handbook.pdf. (accessed 11 November 2002); Goh, Contours of Culture, 54. 29. Goh, Contours of Culture, 54, 56; Chua Beng Huat, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore; Chua Beng Huat, Political Legitimacy and Housing: Stakeholding in Singapore (London: Routledge, 1997). 30. There were race riots in Malaysia and Singapore in 1964 (connected with religious processions) and in Malaysia in 1969. The population ratios were maintained from the time of independence and, as discussed in the introduction, the distribution of races in 2000 was as follows: Chinese 76.8 percent, Malay 13.9 percent, Indian 7.9 percent, other 1.4 percent. Singapore Dept of Statistics, May 2001, 1–2. Because the HDB policy followed these same ratios in the distribution of housing, the Indian minority has a limited choice of locations.

notes to pages 226–229

313

31. Goh, Contours of Culture, 55. 32. Chua Beng Huat, “Fabricating Singapore: A Politics of Cultural Anxiety,” paper presented at University of California, Berkeley, 1 April 2003. “The cultural sphere in Singapore is split by the noisily displayed race-cultures of Chinese, Malays and Indians and the denial of capitalism in its cultural forms. The discontent of capitalism is suppressed as entailments of the necessity of survival. Yet, the inscription of race-cultures is not convincing. This leaves ‘Singaporean’ identity in a space that is both too-full and an absence. The ongoing cultural anxieties of the people and its government must be placed within these contradictory stresses.” 33. Ibid. 34. One People One Nation One Singapore, music by Jeremy Ian Monteiro, lyrics by Jim Atchison, sung for National Day, Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts, 2002, http://www.mita.gov.sg/songs.htm. 35. Ananda Rajah, “Making and Managing Tradition in Singapore: The National Day Parade,” in Kwok Kian-Woon, Kwa Chong Guan, Lily Kong, and Brenda Yeoh eds., Our Place in Time: Exploring Heritage and Memory in Singapore, 108 (Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society, 1999). 36. See Little India: Historic District, Singapore: Urban Redevelopment Authority, 1995. 37. D. Divyanathan, “Foreigner Boosted Economy by 37%,” Straits Times, 1 November, S10, quoted in Goh, Contours of Culture, 127. 38. Goh, Contours of Culture, 128. 39. Ministry of Manpower, Singapore, “Overview of Work Passes,” http://www.mom.gov.sg/publish/momportal/en/communities/work_pass/ overview_of_work_passes.html (accessed 8 November 2007). 40. Immigration Laws: December 1996, no. 21, Foreign Workers in Singapore, http://www.migrationint.com.au/news/paris/dec_1996-21mn.html. There are 350,000 foreign workers employed in Singapore, nearly 12 percent of the population. Most of the foreign workers in Singapore are from Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Bangaladesh, Sri Lanka, and India. See “Singapore Employers of Foreign Maids Get a Warning,” Agence France Presse, 21 November 1996; Tan Ooi Boon, “Contractors Must Check Foreign Workers’ Papers,” Straits Times, 9 November 1996; Audrey Tan, “Maximum Job Period For Foreign Workers Extended,” Business Times, 6 November 1996; Yeow Pei Lin, “Skilled Workers Can Be Kept For 10 Years Now,” Straits Times, 6 November 1996; “Singapore Minister Warns of Dangerous Dependence On Foreign Labor,” Agence France Presse, 4 November 1996. 41. “Police have estimated that every Sunday, up to 40,000 foreign workers from the Indian subcontinent converge on Little India,” speech by Dr. Lee Boon Yang, Ministry of Manpower and member of parliament for Jalan Besar, GRC, 3 October 1999, Ministry of Manpower Speeches, http://www.gov.sg/mom/speech/speech99/ m991003.html.

314

notes to pages 229–230

42. Conditions of Work Permit for Employer of Construction Worker, sec. 2, Employment of Foreign Manpower Employment Act Chapter 91A, http://www.mom .gov.sg/publish/etc/medialib/mom_library/work_pass/files.Par.8149.File.dat/WP_S _Pass_Conditions.pdf. 43. Anjum, “Indians Roar in the Lion City.” The vast majority of the 350,000 Indians in Singapore, almost 64 percent, are Tamil. They are followed by Punjabis, 8 percent; Malayalis, 8 percent; Sindhis, 6 percent; and Gujaratis, 2 percent. 44. Ibid. Less than 9 percent of Indian expats (permanent residents) in 1990 held college degrees. By contrast, in 2000 almost 51 percent of Indian permanent residents were college educated. 45. “Indian Expats: How Separate Are They?” Straits Times, 25 March 2007. Indian expatriates have been buying properties in districts 9, 10, and 15—Ardmore, Grange, Holland, and Meyer Road. 46. “Contracts of unskilled foreign workers are to last for two years and this contract is renewable for another two years. So workers hope for four years in total.” See Md. Mizanur Rahman, The Asian Economic Crisis and Bangladeshi Workers in Singapore (Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, Working Papers, no. 147, 1999), 23. 47. “Because of a domestic labor shortage, approximately 600,000 foreign workers are employed legally, constituting about 30 percent of the total work force. . . . Foreign workers face no legal wage discrimination. However, they are concentrated in low-wage, low-skill jobs and often are required to work long hours. . . . Many lower paid foreign workers not covered under the Employment Act are ineligible for the limited free legal assistance that is available to citizens. However, the Ministry of Manpower also offers mediation services for all employees, foreign or local. The Government allows complainants to seek legal redress.” Economic Research Institute, Human Resources Codes and Laws, Singapore, 2001, http://www.eri.com/freedata/hrcodes/ index.singapore.htm. 48. Foreign workers are usually paid on a considerably lower scale than Singaporeans and do not receive company contributions toward retirement and other benefits. Many live in makeshift housing on industrial sites with only elementary amenities. Ministry efforts to house foreign construction workers in improved quarters have so far met with resistance from citizens concerned that the relatively high incidence of criminal activity at the on-site living quarters would spread to their communities. Work permit holders are not allowed to marry, nor are they eligible to apply for permanent resident status. Workers caught overstaying as illegal immigrants are liable for caning and expulsion. See Singapore Foreign Labor Trends, Trade Report, 1994-1995, http://www.tradeport.org/ts/countries/ singapore/flt.html. See also George Ofori, “Foreign Construction Workers in Singapore,” International Labor Organization, Sectoral Activities, http://www.ilo.org/public/english/ dialogue/sector/papers/forconst/forcon7.htm (accessed 23 January 2008).

notes to pages 231–233

315

49. Heritage guidelines for renovating shophouses attempt to reconstruct identical façades while ensuring that the interiors comply with contemporary fire regulations. In many instances this involves rebuilding the shophouse as a replica of its previous design. 50. Goh, Contours of Culture, 135. 51. Ibid., 131–135. 52. See, Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship. 53. Ibid., 13, 16. 54. Ibid., 21. 55. Ibid., 220. 56. Maelvyn Tan Wy Ying, “Are S’poreans Snobbish or Plain Ignorant,” Straits Times, 19 August 2000. Tan comments, “We ignore and despise the foreign workers who build our roads, houses and all other facilities that have made a whole lot of difference to Singapore.” Similarly, the declaration “We Are Acting Like British Colonials” (Straits Times, 21 July 2000) provoked a series of responses regarding the treatment of foreign maids. See also Straits Times, 27 July 2000. 57. Economic Research Institute, Human Resources Codes and Laws, http://www .erieri.com/freedata/hrcodes/index.htm?singapore.htm (accessed 12 December 2002). Singapore, Report of Human Rights Practices (2001, U.S. Department of State), Section 6 Worker Rights, Re: The Right of Association. Under these laws, any group consisting of ten or more persons is required to register with the government. These restrictions replicate the Municipal Act of 1856 (PRO CO 273-5, 248) in conformity with Section 77 of Act XVIII of 1856, 8 March 1860, PWI: ‘The Act regulating public processions and assemblies.’ 58. Sinapan Samidorai, “Singapore: 200 Indian Workers Protest at Indian Embassy,” 29 June 2004, http://www.thinkcentre.org/article.cfm?ArticleID=2402 (accessed 11 December 2007), regarding a dispute with Wan Soon Construction, which was ultimately settled through the Ministry of Manpower (MOM). 59. According to statistics provided by the Hindu Endowments Board in 1998, 8,998 people carried palkudams, ordinary kavatis, and alaku kavatis, which was a 2.4 percent increase over 1997. In total, 583 people carried alaku kavatis, a 7 percent increase since 1997. Tanaka observes that the total number of participants in the procession was 200 in 1966, 60 in 1967, and 100 in 1974. It went up to 1,200 in 1977, then to 5,000 in 1988, 5,800 in 1991, 7,000 in 1993, 7,700 in 1995, 9,500 in 1996. See M. Tanaka, “Hinduism in Singapore: A Case of Ethno-Nationalization,” paper presented at the International Conference, Dynamics of Cultures and Systems in the Pacific Rim (Nara City), 29 February 2000, http://www.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~shakti/preSinga.html (accessed 11 November 2007). 60. Vineeta Sinha, “Constituting and Re-constituting the Religious Domain: In the Modern Nation State of Singapore,” in Kwok Kian-Woon, Kwa Chong Guan, Lily

316

notes to pages 233–234

Kong, and Brenda Yeoh eds., Our Place in Time: Exploring Heritage and Memory in Singapore, 84–85. She mentions incidents in 1979 and 1981. See also Vineeta Sinha, “Hinduism in Contemporary Singapore,” in K. S. Sandhu and A. Mani, eds., Indian Communities in Southeast Asia, chap. 33 (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1993). 61. The festival is held during Tai, the first month, in conjunction with harvest rituals. 62. Vineeta Sinha, A New God in the Diaspora? Muneeswaran Worship in Contemporary Singapore (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005), 18. 63. Kavadi vary from a semicircular decorated canopy on a wooden rod, carried on the shoulders, to paal kudam, a pot of milk carried on the head, but they can take more elaborate forms related to practices of self-mortification. The objective is to offer a vow to Lord Murugan for protection during a time of great tribulation. 64. Deepavali was made a public holiday in place of Thaipusam in 1914, following a petition to the government from the Hindu community. The reason given was that Thaipusam was a Shaiva festival whereas Deepavali was celebrated by both Shaivas and Vaishnavas (notionally both South and North Indian Hindus). TXA, “A Look Back At What Was In The Straits Times,” Straits Times, 25 January 1994. A ban and seizure of musical instruments used at Thaipusam occurred in 1973, the same year that all religious processions on foot, excepting Thaipusam, were banned. See Sinha, “Constituting and Re-constituting the Religious Domain,” 94 fn 5. 65. Theemithi, originally held in public along Albert Street, was later confined to the Sri Mariamman temple. 66. Sinha, A New God in the Diaspora? 271. Sinha is quoting Mary Hancock, Womanhood in the Making: Domestic Ritual and Public Culture in Urban South India (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), 220. 67. Sinha, A New God in the Diaspora? 227. Sinha notes that the songs are often written in Romanized Tamil since many Malaysian Tamils have been educated in Malay. 68. Ibid., 229. 69. “Kavadi Carriers Should Ensure That Supporters Behave Well,” Straits Times, 23 December 1994; “Thaipusam and Frivolous Youth: Education Needed,” Straits Times, 13 February 1991. 70. Straits Times, 23 December 1994; “Thaipusam and Frivolous Youth: Education Needed,” Straits Times, 13 February 1991; “Thaipusam is Not Entertainment,” Straits Times, Mail Bag, 4 February 1994. 71. Traffic Arrangements for Thaipusam Festival 2007, Media Release 28 January 2007, http://www.spf.gov.sg/mic/2007/070128_trafarr_thaipusam.htm (accessed 16 November 2007); “Buddhists Are There To Help,” Straits Times, 3 February 2007. 72. “More Carry Kavadis, Milk Pots,” Straits Times, 29 January 2002; and “Steps to Avert Thaipuasm Jam,” Straits Times, 28 December 2004, quoting S. Nallathamby and V. R. Nathan, respectively.

notes to pages 234–235

317

73. M. Nirmala, “More Hindu Devotees Carrying Kavadis Now,” Straits Times, 18 January 1995, notes that spiked kavadi cost upwards of S$2,000, resulting in a drop in numbers and a corresponding increase in numbers of paal kudam. The guests of honor as reported in the Straits Times, corresponding to the annual festivals: 2 February 2007, 29 January 2007, 12 February 2006. 74. Gauri Parimoo Krishnan, Following Murukan: Tai Pucam in Singapore, Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, http://www.murugan.org/research/gauri_krishnan .htm (accessed 11 November 2007). This is also true of Theemithi fire-walking ritual. In 1997, there were about 2,500 participants, 10 percent of them Chinese. “Theemithi, Fire-walking,” Singapore Infopedia, National Library Board of Singapore, http:// infopedia.nlb.gov.sg/articles/SIP_762_2004-12-23.html. 75. “Fulfilling Their Vows,” Straits Times, 22 January 2000. 76. Vineeta Sinha, “‘Hinduism’ and ‘Taoism’ in Singapore: Seeing Points of Convergence,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 39, no. 1 (February 2008): 132. 77. Ban on Religious Music During Thaipusam, Parliament no. 6, session 2, vol. 47, sitting no. 7 (7 March 1986). 78. Goh, Contours of Culture, 9, describes the “subtle and insinuative politics of plurality” identified by Bakhtin in certain narrative forms. 79. A similar argument can be found in contemporary analyses of globalization. See Wang Gungwu, “Migration and its Enemies,” in Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens, eds., Conceptualizing the Global City, 131–151 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994).

G LOSSARY

Hindi Terms

Murugan, Murukan – Shiva’s son Skanda

adalat or adawlut – a court of justice

Saiva, Shaiva – devotees of Lord Shiva

chadar – sheet chunam – lime

Malay Terms

chutties – clay cooking pots

attap – nippah palm roofing is made from

doits – a small amount of currency, probably the equivalent of a few cents

woven palm leaves from the attap palm (nipah ruticans).

dvarapala – door keeper

chungkul – long-handled spade (from Malay)

gharry – light, horse-drawn carriage

fatwa – ban

ghee – butter from buffalo milk

godown – godong, Malay for storage shed or

guru – spiritual master

warehouse

jet junanza – living tomb

hajis or penghulus – village headmen or elders

kala pani – black water

hikayat – chronicle

kumblie – woolen blanket

kampung – village

kumman – command

kapitans – chief

maistry – artisan, master carpenter who trains

keramats – shrines

others morah – stool

kunda – stick/pole used to carry food in baskets or pails

ryot –farmer

mandore – overseer

Shiva – the primary god in South Indian

parang – a cleaver

pantheon syce – driver, hostler or stable boy

Peranakan – Straits-born, or town Malays as in Jawi-Peranakan

thannas – small huts in timber and attap tindal – head guard or headman

Chinese (predominantly Hokkien) Terms hueys – secret societies

Tamil Terms

kang-chus – chiefs

alaku – weapon, blade or arrowhead

kongsi – association

Ayya – God

pah – strike

kavati – semicircular decorated canopy sup-

sinkeh – laborer

ported by a wooden rod (ceremonial yoke)

samseng – fighting men

kovil – temple

t’ing-chus – chiefs

Mariamman – female deity malevolent aspect

tong kong – lighter raft

of Shakti (Shiva’s wife) Muneeswaran – incarnation of Shiva

319

BI BLIOG RAPHY

Official Records

Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), London India Office Records (IOR): Examiners Office (F) and Judicial (P) series for Bengal, Madras, and Bombay Presidencies Bengal Judicial Proceedings: Criminal Z/P series V22 Bengal Saddar Dewani Adawlut, land cases, Sadr Nizamat Adawlut reports, NW Provinces Sadr Nizamat Adalat/Nizamat Adawlut Decisions Public Records Office (PRO) Colonial Office Series, Official Correspondence Sri Lanka National Archives (SLNA) Straits Settlements Annual Departmental Reports Straits Settlements Blue Books Straits Settlements Government Gazette Straits Settlements Records (SSR): Singapore National Library Series, Official Correspondence.

Newspapers

Illustrated London News Penang Gazette Singapore Free Press (Singapore National Library) Straits Observer Straits Times (Singapore National Library)

Publications

Abdullah, bin Abdul Kadir. The Hikayat Abdullah. Translated by A. H. Hill. Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JMBRAS) 28, pt. 3 (June 1955). Abu Lughod, Janet. “Tale of Two Cities: The Origins of Modern Cairo.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 7, no. 4 (1965): 429–457. Abu Lughod, Janet, and Richard Hay Jr., eds. Third World Urbanization. Chicago: Maroufa Press, 1977. Ahluwalia, M. L. Rebels Against the Raj. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 1967. Al Sayyad, Nezar. “Urbanism and the Dominance Equation.” In Nezar Al Sayyad, ed., Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise, 1–26. Aldershot: Avebury, 1992. 321

322

bibliography

Alatas, Syed Hussein. The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism. London: F. Cass, 1977. Andaya, Barbara Watson. Perak, the Abode of Grace: A Study of An Eighteenth-Century Malay State. East Asian Historical Monographs. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1979. Andaya, Barbara Watson, and Leonard Y. Andaya. A History of Malaysia, 2nd ed. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001. Anderson, Clare. Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815–53. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. ———. “Fashioning Identities: Convict Dress in Colonial South and Southeast Asia.” History Workshop Journal 52 (2001): 153­–174. ———. The Indian Uprising of 1857–8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion, London: Anthem, 2007. ———. Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia. Oxford: Berg, 2004. ———. “The Politics of Convict Space: Penal Settlements in Southeast Asia.” In Alison Bashford and Carolyn Strange, eds., Isolation: Places and Practices of Exclusion, 40–55. London: Routledge, 2002. ———. “Sepoys, Servants and Settlers: Convict Transportation in the Indian Ocean, 1787–1945.” In Frank Dikötter and Ian Brown, eds., Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America, 185–220. London: Hurst & Co. Ltd., 2007. Anderson, Clare, and David Arnold, “Envisioning the Colonial Prison.” In Frank Dikötter and Ian Brown, eds., Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America, 302–331. London: Hurst & Co. Ltd., 2007. Arnold, David. “The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge and Penology in 19th Century India.” In Ranajit Guha, ed., A Subaltern Studies Reader, 140–178. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. ———. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. ———. “India: The Contested Prison.” In Frank Dikötter and Ian Brown, eds., Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America, 147–184. London: Hurst & Co. Ltd., 2007. Babcock, Barbara. The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Edited by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. ———. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968.

bibliography

323

Bankoff, Greg. Crime, Society and the State in the Nineteenth Century Philippines, 2nd ed. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000 (orig. pub. 1996). Bartley, W. “The Population of Singapore in 1819.” In Mubin Sheppard, ed., Singapore 150 Years, 117. Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (MBRAS), Singapore: Times Books International, 1984 (orig. pub. JMBRAS XLII, pt. 1, 1969). Bastin, John, ed. The Journal of Thomas Otho Travers 1813–1820. Singapore: A. G. Banfield, 1960. ———, comp. Travellers’ Singapore: An Anthology. Oxford in Asia, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994. Beamish, Jane, and Jane Ferguson. A History of Singapore Architecture. Singapore: Graham Brash, Pte. Ltd., 1985. Beccaria, Cesare. Dei Delitti e delle Pene (On Crimes and Punishments). Liverno, 1764. Begbie, P. J. The Malayan Peninsula. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1967 (orig. pub. Madras: Vepery Mission Press, 1834). Bernault, Florence. “The Shadow of Rule: Colonial Power and Modern Punishment in Africa.” In Frank Dikötter and Ian Brown, eds., Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Asia, Africa and Latin America, 55–94. London: Hurst & Co. Ltd., 2007. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bird, Isabella. The Golden Chersonese and the Way Tither. New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1883. From http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/bird/isabella/golden/. Accessed 31 January 2008. Bishop, Ryan, John Phillips, and Wei-Wei Yeo, eds. Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes. London: Routledge, 2003. Blauner, Robert. “Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt.” Social Problems 16, no. 4 (1969): 393–408. ———. Racial Oppression in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Blythe, Wilfred. The Impact of Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya: A Historical Study. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Bogaars, G. E. “The Effect of Opening the Suez Canal on the Trade and Development of Singapore.” In Mubin Sheppard, ed., Singapore 150 Years, 220–264. Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (MBRAS), Singapore: Times Books International, 1984 (orig. pub. JMBRAS XLII, pt. 1, 1969). Bordieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984. ———. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, 1977. Bradell, Roland. “Lung-Ya-Men and Tan-Ma-His.” In Mubin Sheppard, ed., Singapore 150 Years, 16–31. Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (MBRAS), Singapore: Times Books International, 1984 (orig. pub. JMBRAS XLII, pt. 1, 1969). Braithwaite, John. “Crime in a Convict Republic.” The Modern Law Review 64, no. 1 (January 2001): 11–50.

324

bibliography

Breckenridge, Carol A., and Peter van der Veer, eds. Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. British Parliamentary Paper C4366, Correspondence Respecting Recent Coolie Disturbance in Trinidad at Mohurrum Festival. Broadbent, James, and Joy Hughes. Francis Greenway Architect. Glebe, N.S.W.: Historic Houses Trust, 1997. Brown, Ian. “A Commissioner Calls: Alexander Paterson and Colonial Burma’s Prisons.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (June 2007): 293–308. ———. “Southeast Asia: Reform and the Colonial Prison.” In Frank Dikötter and Ian Brown, eds., Cultures of Confinement: a History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America, 221–268. London: Hurst & Co. Ltd., 2007. Buckley, C. B. An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore. Reprint, Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1965 (orig. pub., Singapore: Fraser and Neave Ltd., 1902). Burchill, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality With Two Lectures and An Interview with Michel Foucault. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Cameron, John. Our Tropical Possessions in Malayan India. Reprint, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford in Asia, 1965 (orig. pub., London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1865). Carroll, Diana. “Hikayat Abdullah: Discourse of Dissent.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JMBRAS) LXXII, pt. 2 (1999): 92–129. Carstens, Sharon. Histories, Cultures, Identities: Studies in Malaysian Chinese Worlds. Reprint, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2006 (orig. pub. 2005). Carter, Paul. The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987. Cassella, Eleanor Conlin. Archaeology of the Ross Female Factory. Launceston: Records of the Queen Victoria Museum, 2002, no. 108. Çelik, Zeynep. Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers Under French Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ———. Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Chattopadhyay, Swati. Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny. London: Routledge, 2005. Chinatown: An Album of a Singapore Community, Singapore: Times Books International, 1983.

bibliography

325

Choo, Alexandra Avieropoulou. Report on the Excavation at Fort Canning Hill, Singapore. Singapore: National Museum Singapore, 1986. Chua Beng Huat. Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore. London: Routledge, 1995. ———. Political Legitimacy and Housing: Stakeholding in Singapore. London: Routledge, 1997. Chua Beng Huat and Norman Edwards. Public Space: Design, Use and Management. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1992. Chua Beng Huat and Kwok Kian Woon. “Social Pluralism in Singapore.” In Robert W. Hefner, ed., The Politics of Multiculturalism: Pluralism and Citizenship in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, 86–118. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2001. Clarke, Marcus Andrew Hislop. For the Term of His Natural Life. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1899. Collis, Maurice. Raffles. London: Faber and Faber, 1966. Comber, L. F. Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya: A Survey of the Triad Society from 1800 to 1900. New York: J. J. Augustin, 1959. ———. An Introduction to Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya. Singapore: Donald Moore, 1957. David, Saul. The Indian Mutiny 1857. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 2003 (orig. pub. London: Viking, 2002). Davies, Donald. Old Penang. Singapore: Donald Moore, 1956. ———. More Old Singapore. Singapore: Donald Moore, 1956. de Silva, K. M. A History of Sri Lanka. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2003. Dhoraisingam, Samuel S. Peranakan Indians of Singapore and Melaka: Indian Babas and Nonyas–Chitty Melaka. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006. ———. Singapore’s Heritage: Through Places of Historical Interest. Singapore: Elixir Consultancy Service, 1991. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. New York: New American Library, 1963. Dikötter, Frank. Crime, Punishment and the Prison in Modern China. London:

Hurst & Co., 2002. Dikötter, Frank, and Ian Brown, eds. Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Asia, Africa and Latin America. London: Hurst & Co. Ltd., 2007. Dobbs, Stephen. The Singapore River: A Social History, 1819–2002. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003. Dovey, Kim. “Dialectics of Place: Authenticity, Identity, Difference.” In De-Placing Difference: Architecture, Culture and Imaginative Geography. CAMEA, Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture, 3rd Symposium, The University of Adelaide, 2002, 45–52. Dutton, Michael. Policing Chinese Politics: A History. Asia Pacific series. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005.

326

bibliography

Duncan, J. S. The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretations in the Kandyan Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Edwards, Norman. The Singapore House and Residential Life 1819–1939. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990. Engels, Friedrich. The Conditions of the Working Class in England. Edited by David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 (orig. pub. London, 1845). Enloe, Cynthia. “Issues and Integration in Malaysia.” Pacific Affairs 41 (1968–1969): 372–385. Evenson, Norma. The Indian Metropolis: A View Toward the West. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989. Evers, Hans-Dieter, and Rüdiger Korff. Southeast Asian Urbanism. Germany: Lit Verlag, 2000. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1965. Finlay, Moses. “Colonies: An attempt at a typology.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, ser. V, no. 26 (1976): 167–188. Firmstone, H. W. Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JSBRAS), no. 42 (1905): 54–208. Flannigan, C. Clifford. “Liminality, Carnival, and Social Structure: The Case of the Late Medieval Biblical Drama.” In Kathleen M. Ashley, ed., Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism: Between Literature and Anthropology, 42–69. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Flower, Raymond. Mutiara: A Perspective of Penang. Singapore: Treasury Publishing; Vienna: Andreas Augustin, 1989. Folch-Serra, Mireya. “Place Voice Space: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dialogical Landscape.” Society and Space 8 (1990): 255–274. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. ———. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Random House, 1965. ———. Power and Knowledge. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Fujimoto, Helen. The South Indian Muslim Community and the Evolution of the Jawi Peranakan in Penang up to 1948. Tokyo: ILCAA, Tokyo Gaikokugo Daigaku, 1988. Furnivall, J. S. Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948; New York: New York University Press, 1956. ———. The Fashioning of Leviathan: The Beginnings of British Rule in Burma. Edited by Gehan Wijeyewardene. Canberra: Published in association with the Economic History of Southeast Asia Project and the Thai-Yunnan Project, Series title: An Occasional Paper of the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, the Australian National University, 1991.

bibliography

327

———. Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy. New York: Macmillan, 1944. Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Gatrell, V. C. G. Ceremonial Opening of the New Supreme Court Building Singapore by His Excellency Sir Shenton Thomas, Thursday 3rd August 1939. Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1939. Ghandharab, Seva Singh. Early Sikh Pioneers of Singapore. Singapore, 1986 (pamphlet). Gibson-Hill, C. A. Singapore Old Strait and New Harbour, 1300–1870, Memoirs of Raffles Museum, no. 3. Singapore: Govt. Printing Press, December 1956. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Gillis, E. Kay. Singapore Civil Society and British Power. Singapore: Talisman Publishing, 2005. “Globalization and Ethnic Divisions in European Cities.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS) 22, no. 4 (October 1996). Special Issue. Glover, William J. Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Godley, Michael. Mandarin-Capitalists from Nanyang: Overseas Chinese Enterprise in the Modernization of China 1893–1911. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Goh, Robbie. Contours of Culture: Space and Social Difference in Singapore. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005. Goh, Robbie, and Brenda S. A. Yeoh, eds. Theorizing the Southeast Asian City as Text: Urban Landscapes, Cultural Documents, and Interpretative Experiences. Singapore: World Scientific, 2003. Gorman, Anthony. “Regulation, Reform and Resistance in the Middle Eastern Prison.” In Frank Dikötter and Ian Brown, eds., Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Asia, Africa and Latin America, 95–146. London: Hurst & Co. Ltd., 2007. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from ‘The Prison Notebooks.’ Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Green, A. G. “Prison Discipline in Ceylon.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Ceylon) II, pt. II, no. 5 (1849): 166–179. Guha, Ranajit. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. ———. “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency.” In Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies, 45–86. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. ———, ed. A Subaltern Studies Reader 1986–1995. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

328

bibliography

Guha, Ranajit, and Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak. Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hamilton, A. W. “The Boria.” Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JSBRAS) 82 (1920): 139–144. ———. “Hindustani, Tamil, Sanskrit and Other Loan Words in Malay.” Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JSBRAS) 80 (1919): 29–38. Hancock, Mary. Womanhood in the Making: Domestic Ritual and Public Culture in Urban South India. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999. Hancock, T. H. H. Coleman’s Singapore. Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (MBRAS), in association with Pelanduk Publications, 1986. Haughton, H. T. “Native Names of Streets in Singapore.” In Mubin Sheppard, ed., Singapore 150 Years, 208–219. Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (MBRAS), Singapore: Times Books International, 1984 (orig. pub. JMBRAS XLII, pt. 1, 1969). Havers, R. P. W. Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience. London: Routledge, Curzon, 2003. Hazareesingh, Sandip. The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity: Urban Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay City 1900–1925. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007. Hechter, Michael. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Hefner, Robert W., ed. The Politics of Multiculturalism: Pluralism and Citizenship in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2001. Heilbroner, Robert. L. The Worldly Philosophers. New York: Touchstone, 1953, 42–74. Henderson, Capt. John MacDonald. The History of the Rebellion in Ceylon during Lord Torrington’s Government Affording a Comparison with Jamaica and Governor Eyre. London: Charles J. Skeet, 1868. Heng, Geraldine, and Janadas Devan. “State Fatherhood: The Politics of Nationalism, Sexuality and Race in Singapore.” In Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz, eds., Bewitching Women Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia, 195–215. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Hindus, Michael Stephen. Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767–1878. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Hirst, J. B. (John Bradley). Convict Society and Its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales. Sydney: G. Allen & Unwin, 1983. Holston, James, ed. Cities and Citizenship. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1999. Hosagrahar, Jyoti. Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism. London: Routledge, 2005.

bibliography

329

Hoyt, Sarnia Hayes. Old Penang. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore. New York: Knopf, 1987. Ignatief, Michael. A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850. New York: Pantheon, 1978. ———. “State, Civil Society, and Total Institutions: A Critique of Recent Social Histories of Punishment,” Crime and Justice 3 (1981): 153–192. ———. “State, Civil Society and Total Institutions: A Critique of Recent Social Histories of Punishment.” In Stanley Cohen and Andrew Scull, eds., Social Control and the State, 75–76. Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983 (reprint). Irschick, Eugene. Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795–1895. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Jacobs, Jane Margaret. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City. London: Routledge, 1996. Jacobs, Jane Margaret, and Ruth Fincher, eds., Cities of Difference. New York: Guilford Press, 1998. Johnston, Norman. Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. ­­———. The Human Cage: A Brief History of Prison Architecture. New York: Walker and Co., 1973. Kahn, Joel S. Other Malays: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World. ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2006. ———, ed. Southeast Asian Identities: Culture and Politics of Representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998. Kaplan, David. H., and Steven R. Holloway. Segregation in Cities. Washington, D.C.: Association of American Geographers, 1998. Keith, A. Berriedale, ed. Speeches and Documents on Indian Policy, 1750–1921, vol. I. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1922, 382–386. Kerr, James Semple. Out of Sight Out of Mind: Australia’s Places of Confinement, 1788– 1988. Sydney: S. H. Ervin Gallery, National Trust of Australia, 1988. Khoo Khay Kim. “Malaysia: Immigration and the Growth of a Plural Society.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JMBRAS) LXXI (1998): 1–25. Khoo, Su Nin. “The Acheen Street Community: A Melting Pot of the Malay World.” Pulau Penang 2, no. 2 (January 1990): 19–29. ———. Streets of George Town Penang. Malaysia: Janus Print and Resources, 1993. King, Anthony D. The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995 (orig. pub. 1984). ———. Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power, and Environment. London and Boston: Routledge & Paul, 1976.

330

bibliography

———. “The Language of Colonial Urbanization.” Sociology 8, no. 1 (1974): 81–110. ———, ed. Re-presenting the City: Ethnicity Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis. New York: New York University Press, 1996. ———. “Rethinking Colonialism: An Epilogue.” In Nezar Al Sayyad, ed., Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise, 339–355. Aldershot and Brookfield, Vt.: Avebury, 1992. ———. “Writing Colonial Space: A Review Article.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 3 (July 1995): 541–554. Kostof, Spiro. The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Form Through History. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992. ———. The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991. ———. A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Krishnan, R. B. Indians in Malaya: A Pageant of Greater India. Singapore: The Malayan Publishers, 1936. Kusno, Abidin. Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia. London: Routledge, 2000. Kwa Chong Guan. “From Temasek to Singapore: Locating a Global City-State in the Cycles of Melaka Straits History.” In John N. Miksic and Cheryl-Ann Low Mei Gek, eds., Early Singapore: 1300s–1819, 124–146. Singapore: Singapore History Museum, 2004. Lawrie, Archibald Campbell. A Gazetteer of the Central Province of Ceylon, vol. 1. Colombo: George J. A. Skeen, Government Printer Ceylon, 1896. Reprinted at the State Printing Corporation, Sri Lanka. Lee Kip Lin. The Singapore House 1819–1942. Singapore: Times Edition for Preservation of Monuments Board, 1988. ———. Telok Ayer Market. Singapore: Archives and Oral History Department, 1983. Lee, Kuan-Yew. 40 Nian Zhenglun Xuan: Selections from 40 Years of Political Writings. Singapore: Lianhe Zaobao Press, 1993. Lee Yong Kiat. The Medical History of Singapore. Tokyo: South East Asian Medical Information Center, no. 14, 1978. ———. “The 1926 General Hospital Singapore.” Annals, Academy of Medicine, Singapore 34 (2005): 52C–60C. Lim, Jon Sun Hock, ed. Transforming Traditions: Architecture in ASEAN Countries. ASEAN Studies Publication Series. Singapore: The ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information, 2001. Lim, Irene. Secret Societies in Singapore. Singapore: Singapore History Museum, 1999. Little India: Historic District. Singapore: Urban Redevelopment Authority, 1995. Liu, Gretchen. In Granite and Chunam: The National Monuments of Singapore. Singapore: Landmark Books, 1996.

bibliography

331

———. Singapore: A Pictorial History, 1819–2000. Singapore: National Heritage Board, 1999. Lo Man Yuk. “Chinese Names of Streets in Penang.” Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JSBRAS) 33 (1900): 197–246. Logan, William, ed. The Disappearing City: Protecting Asia’s Urban Heritage in a Globalizing World. Hong Kong and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. “Hoa Lo: A Vietnamese Approach to Conserving Places of Pain and Injustice.” Paper presented to the “Islands of Vanishment” Conference, Port Arthur Historic Site Management Committee in conjunction with the University of Tasmania, the Tasman Institute of Conservation and Convict Studies, and Australia ICOMOS. Port Arthur, Tasmania, 7–10 June 2002. ———. “Hoa Lo: A Vietnamese Approach to Conserving Places of Pain and Injustice.” Historic Environment 17, no. 1 (2003): 27–31. ———. “Hoa Lo, Vietnam’s Hanoi Hilton.” In William Logan and Keir Reeves, eds., Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with Difficult Heritage, chap 15. London: Routledge, 2008 (forthcoming). Logan, William, and Keir Reeves, eds. Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with Difficult Heritage. London: Routledge, 2008, (forthcoming). Low, Cheryl-Ann Mei Gek. “Singapore from the 14th to the 19th Century.” In John N. Miksic and Cheryl-Ann Low Mei Gek, eds., Early Singapore: 1300s–1819, 14–40. Singapore: Singapore History Museum, 2004. Maalouf, Amin. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. Translated by Jon Rothschild. New York: Shocken Books, 1984. Mak Lau Fong. The Sociology of Chinese Secret Societies: A Study of Chinese Secret Societies in Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia. Kuala Lampur: Oxford University Press, 1981. Makepeace, Walter, Gilbert Brooke, and Roland Braddell, eds. One Hundred Years of Singapore, vols. 1 & 2. Reprint, Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991 (orig. pub., London: John Murray, 1921). Mani, A. “Indians in Singapore Society.” In K. S. Sandhu and A. Mani, eds., Indian Communities in Southeast Asia, 788–809. Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1993. Markus, Thomas. Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types. London: Routledge, 1993. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, The Process of Capitalist Production. Edited by Friedrich Engels. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Co., 1906 (orig. pub., 1867). ———. “The Future Results of British Rule in India.” The New York Daily Tribune, 8 August 1853, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 12, New York: International Publishers, 1975, 217–222. From digital archive: Works of Karl Marx, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm. Accessed 31 January 2008.

332

bibliography

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Edited with an introduction by David McLellan. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Maryatt, Frank S. Borneo and the Indian Archipelago, with Drawings of Costumes and Scenery. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848. Masselos, Jim. “Change and Custom in the Format of the Bombay Mohurrum during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 5, no. 2 (December 1982): 47–67. ———. The City in Action: Bombay Struggles for Power. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007. McGee, T. G. The Southeast Asian City: A Social Geography of the Primate Cities of Southeast Asia. New York: Fredrick A. Praeger, 1967. McNair, Major J. F. A. Prisoners Their Own Warders. London: Archibald Constable and Co., 1899 (assisted by W. D. Bayliss). Meinig, D. W. “Symbolic Landscapes.” In D. W. Meinig, ed., The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays, 164–192. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Metcalf, Thomas. Ideologies of the Raj. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002. Miksic, John N. “14th-Century Singapore: A Port of Trade.” In John N. Miksic and Cheryl-Ann Low Mei Gek, eds. Early Singapore: 1300s–1819, 41–54. Singapore: Singapore History Museum, 2004. Miksic, John N., and Cheryl-Ann Low Mei Gek, eds. Early Singapore: 1300s–1819, Singapore: Singapore History Museum, 2004. Moore, Donald and Joanna. The First Hundred and Fifty Years of Singapore. Singapore: Donald Moore Press Ltd., 1969, in association with the Singapore Chamber of Commerce. Morrel, W. P. British Colonial Policy in the Age of Peel and Russell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930. Morris, Norval, and David J. Rothman, eds. The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Mouat, F. J. “On Prison Ethics and Prison Labour.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 54, no. 2 (June 1891): 213–262. ———. Prison Discipline and its Results in Bengal (first published in the Journal of the Society of Arts in 1872). In Herbert Spencer, “Prison-Ethics.” The British Quarterly Review (July 1860) in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, vol. 3. London: Williams and Norgate, 1891. From http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/337/12298. Accessed 30 January 2008. Murfett, Malcolm H., John N. Miksic, Brian P. Farrell, and Chiang Ming Shun. Between Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore from First Settlement to Final British Withdrawal. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic, 2005.

bibliography

333

Musa, Mahani. “Malays and the Red and White Flag Societies in Penang, 1830s–1920s.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JMBRAS) LXXII, pt. 2 (1999): 151–182. ———. Prison Industry in its Primitive, Reformatory, and Economic Aspects (London, November 1889). In Herbert Spencer, “Prison-Ethics,” The British Quarterly Review (July 1860), in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, vol. 3. London: Williams and Norgate, 1891. From http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/337/12298. Accessed 30 January 2008. Nagata, Judith. “Perceptions of Social Inequality in Malaysia.” In Judith Nagata, ed., Contributions to Asian Studies, vol. VII. Pluralism in Malaysia: Myth and Reality, A Symposium on Singapore and Malaysia. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975. ———, ed., Pluralism in Malaysia: Myth and Reality, A Symposium on Singapore and Malaysia. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975. Nalbantoglu, Gulsum Baydar, and Wong Chong Thai, eds. Postcolonial Space(s). New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997. Nasution, Khoo Salma, and Malcolm Wade. Penang Postcards Collection: 1899–1930s. Penang: Janus Print & Resources, 2003. Newbold, Lieut. T. J., and Major General F. W. Wilson. “The Chinese Secret Triad Society of the Tien-ti-huih.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (JRAS) VI (1841): 120–158. Nicholas, Stephen, ed. Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988; Sydney: G. Allen & Unwin, 1983. Nicholas, Stephen, and Peter R. Shergold. “Transportation as Global Migration.” In Stephen Nicholas, ed., Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Ng, David. Penang in Old Postcards: The City and the Suburbs in the Early Twentieth Century. Penang: Georgetown Printers, 1986. O’Brien, Patricia. “Crime and Punishment as Historical Problem.” Journal of Society and History 11 (1977–1978): 508–520. ———. The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in 19th Century France. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. Ogborn, Miles. “Discipline, Government and Law: Separate Confinement in the Prisons of England and Wales, 1830–1877.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 20, no. 3 (1995): 295–311. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1999. Ong, Aihwa, and Michael G. Peletz, eds. Bewitching Women Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Oxley, Deborah. Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

334

bibliography

Panabokke, P. B., and J. A. Halangoda, eds. The Autobiography of Tikiri Banda Panbokke. Kandy: Miller and Co. Ltd., 1938(?). Parmer, J. Norman. Colonial Labour Policy and Administration: A History of Labour in the Rubber Plantation Industry in Malaya, 1910–1941. Gluckstadt: J. J. Augustin, 1960. Pearson, H. F. “Lt. Jackson’s Plan of Singapore.” In Mubin Sheppard, ed., Singapore 150 Years, 150–154. Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (MBRAS). Singapore: Times Books International, 1984 (orig. pub. JMBRAS XLII, pt. 1, 1969). ———. “Singapore from the Sea, June 1823.” In Mubin Sheppard, ed., Singapore 150 Years, 135–149. Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (MBRAS). Singapore: Times Books International, 1984 (orig. pub. JMBRAS XLII, pt. 1, 1969). Penang Past and Present, 1786–1963. Publication compiled by Penang Historical Society subcommittee, Penang: City Council of George Town, 1966. Perera, Nihal. “Indigenising the Colonial City: Late 19th-century Colombo and its Landscape.” Urban Studies 39, no. 9 (1 August 2002): 1703–1721. ———. Society and Space: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Postcolonial Identity in Sri Lanka. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998. Pieris, Anoma. “The Colonial Landscape and its Convict Contractors.” In Cross Currents: Transcultural Architecture, Education and Urbanism. Proceedings of the ACSA International Conference, Hong Kong, 2000, 328–334. ———. “The Hidden Hand of Colonial Capital: Penal labour and public works.” In The Scaffolding of Empire, CAMEA (Center for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture) 4th Symposium, Conference Proceedings, University of Adelaide, 2007, 105–126. ———. “On Dropping Bricks and Other Disconcerting Subjects: Unearthing convict histories in Singapore.” Fabrications (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand) 15, no. 2 (December 2005): 77–93. ———. “The Perils of Association? John Thomas Keyt.” The Ceylankan (Journal of the Sri Lankan Association of Australia) 22, no. vii (2003): 24–26. ———. “Tikiri Banda Dunuwila, A Reluctance to Labor.” The Ceylankan (Journal of the Sri Lankan Association of Australia) 21, no. vi (2003): 13–15. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, and Bhikhu Parekh. “Shifting Imaginaries: De-colonization, Internal Colonization, Postcoloniality.” In Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh, eds., The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power, 1–19. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books, 1995. Pillai, Shanthini. Colonial Visions: Postcolonial Revisions, Images of the Indian Diaspora in Malaysia. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Prakash, Vikramaditya, and Peter Scriver, eds. Colonial Modernities: Building Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon. London: Routledge, 2007. Probert, H. A. The History of Changi. Singapore: Changi Prison Press, 1965. PuroShotam, Nirmala. Disciplining Differences: Race in Singapore. Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, Working Papers, 1995.

bibliography

335

———. “Disciplining Difference: Race in Singapore.” In Joel S. Kahn, ed., Southeast Asian Identities: Culture and Politics of Representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998. ———. Negotiating Multiculturalism: Disciplining Difference in Singapore. Berlin: Muton de Gruyter, 2000. Rabinow, Paul. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989. Radzinowicz, Leon. “The Evolution of the Modern English Prison System.” The Modern Law Review 3, no. 2 (October 1939): 121–135. Rafael, Vicente, ed. Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines and Colonial Vietnam. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1999. Raffles, Lady Sophia. Memoir of the life and public services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles. London: John Murray, 1830. Rahman, Md. Mizanur. The Asian Economic Crisis and Bangladeshi Workers in Singapore. Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, Working Papers, no. 147, 1999. Rai, Rajesh. “Sepoys, Convicts and the ‘Bazaar’ Contingent: The Emergence and Exclusion of ‘Hindustani’ Pioneers at the Singapore Frontier.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35, no. 1 (2004): 1–19. Rajah, Ananda. “Making and Managing Tradition in Singapore: The National Day Parade.” In Kwok Kian-Woon, Kwa Chong Guan, Lily Kong, and Brenda Yeoh, eds., Our Place in Time: Exploring Heritage and Memory in Singapore, 96–110. Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society, 1999. Reid, Anthony, ed. Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. Reynolds, Geoff. Gaol Regulations 1867: For the Guidance of the Prison Staff in the Colony of New South Wales. Bateman’s Bay, N.S.W.: Possum Printing, 1993. Ross, Robert, and Gerard J. Telkamp, eds. Colonial Cities: Essays on Urbanism in a Colonial Context. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985. Rothman, David. The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic. Boston: Little Brown, 1971. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. ———. Orientalism. London: Pantheon, 1978. Salman, Michael. “Nothing without Labor: Penology, Discipline and Independence in the Philippines under the United States Rule.” In Vicente Rafael, ed., Discrepent Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures, 113–132. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. Salvatore, Ricardo D., and Carlos Aguirre, eds. The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Essays on Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control, 1830–1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

336

bibliography

Sandhu, Kernial Singh. “Some Aspects of Indian Settlement in Singapore, 1819–1969.” Journal of Southeast Asian History (JSAH) X, no. 2 (September 1969): 193–201. ———. “Some Preliminary Observations on the Origins and Characteristics of Indian Migration to Malaya, 1786–1957.” In K. G. Tregonning, ed., Papers on Malayan History, from papers submitted to the First International Conference of Southeast Asian Historians, Singapore, January 1961. Journal of Southeast Asian History (1962): 40–72. ———. “Tamil and other Convicts in the Straits Settlements: A. D. 1790–1873.” In Proceedings of the First International Conference of Tamil Studies, Kuala Lampur, 1966, 197–207. Sandhu, Kernial Singh, and A. Mani, eds. Indian Communities in Southeast Asia. Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1993. Sandhu, Kernial Singh, and Paul Wheatley, eds. Melaka: The Transformation of a Malay Capital. With contributions from Abdul Aziz bin Mat Ton et al. Kuala Lumpur and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Sassen, Saskia. “Analytic Borderlands: Race, Gender and Representation in the New City.” In Anthony King ed., Re-presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis, 183–202. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Sauer, C. “The Morphology of the Landscape.” In J. Agnew, D. N. Livingston, and A. Rogers, eds., Human Geography: An Essential Anthology, 296–395. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1969 (orig. pub. 1925). Schimmel, Ann Marie. “Islam in the Indian Subcontinent.” Handbuch der Orientalistik, Abt. II: Indien, Bd. 4:3, E. J. Brill/Leiden Koln, 1980. Schubel, Vernon James. “Karbala as Sacred Space among North American Shi`a ‘Every Day Is Ashura, Everywhere Is Karbala.’” In Barbara Daly Metcalf, ed., Making Muslim Space in Europe and America, 186–203. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Scott, James C. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976. ———. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. ———. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985. ­Seet, K. K. The Istana. Singapore: Times Editions, 2000. Sen, Satadru. Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Seneveratne, John M. The Dunuwille Family. Colombo: The Daily News Press, Lake House, n.d. ca. 1960. Seva Singh, Gandharab. The Early Pioneer Sikhs of Singapore. Pamphlet, 1986. Shafir, Gershan, ed. The Citizenship Debates. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

bibliography

337

Sheppard, Mubin, ed. Singapore 150 Years. Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (MBRAS). Singapore: Times Books International, 1984 (orig. pub. JMBRAS XLII, pt. 1, 1969). Shields, Rob. “A Guide to Urban Representation and What to Do About It: Alternative Traditions of Urban Theory.” In Anthony D. King ed., Re-presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis, 227–252. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Siddique, Sharon, and Nirmala PuruShotam. Singapore’s Little India. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1982. Sidhu, Choor Singh. Bhai Maharaj Singh: Martyr of the Sikh Faith. Singapore: Central Sikh Gurdwara Board, 1999. Simpson, James Young. Side Lights on Siberia: Some Account of the Great Siberian Railroad the Prisons and Exile System. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1898. Sinha, Vineeta. “Constituting and Re-constituting the Religious Domain: In the Modern Nation State of Singapore.” In Kwok Kian-Woon, Kwa Ching Guan, Lily Kong, and Brenda Yeoh, eds., Our Place in Time: Exploring Heritage and Memory in Singapore, 76–95. Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society, 1999. ———. “Hinduism in Contemporary Singapore.” In S. Sandhu and A. Mani, eds., Indian Communities in Southeast Asia, 827–847. Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1993. ———. “‘Hinduism’ and ‘Taoism’ in Singapore: Seeing Points of Convergence.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 39, no. 1 (February 2008): 123–147. ———. A New God in the Diaspora? Muneeswaran Worship in Contemporary Singapore. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005. Singapore Historical Post Cards. From the National Archives Collection. Singapore: Singapore National Archives, August 1986. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiment, or, An essay towards an analysis of the principles, by which men naturally judge concerning the conduct and character, first of their neighbours, and afterwards of themselves. Edited by D. D. Raphael. Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1817 (orig. pub. 1759). ———. An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations. New York: Collier, 1902 (orig. pub. 1776). Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York: Routledge, 1996. Song Ong Siang. One Hundred Years History of the Chinese in Singapore. London: John Murray, 1923. Spear, A. H. Black Chicago: The Making of the Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Spencer, Herbert. “Prison-Ethics.” The British Quarterly Review (July 1860). In Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, vol. 3 (London: Williams and

338

bibliography

Norgate, 1891. From http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/337/12298. Accessed 30 January 2008. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. ———. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” In Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies, 3–32. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. ———. “Subaltern Talk: Interview with the Editors” (on 29 October 1993). In Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean, eds., The Spivak Reader, New York: Routledge, 1996. St. Andrew’s Cathedral. Singapore, 2001. Pamphlet. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Trangression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. Stevens, F. G. “A Contribution to the Early History of Prince of Wales Island.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JMBRAS) VII, pt. III (October 1929): 377–414. Taylor, W. C. Notes of a Tour of the Manufacturing Districts in Lancashire. London: Duncan and Malcolm, 1968 (orig. pub. 1842). Teeters, Negley K., and John D. Shearer. The Prison at Philadelphia Cherry Hill: The Separate System of Penal Discipline 1829–1913. New York: Columbia University Press for Temple University Publications, 1957. Teo, Peggy, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Ooi Giok Ling, and Karen P. Y. Lai. Changing Landscapes of Singapore. Singapore: McGraw Hill Education (Asia), 2004. Thomas, Julian. “Archaeologies of Place and Landscape.” In I. Hodder, ed., Archaeological Theory Today, 165–186. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Thompson, E. P. (Edward Palmer). The Making of the English Working Class. London: V. Gollancz, 1963. Tips, Walter E. J. Crime and Punishment in King Chulalongkorn’s Kingdom: The Special Commission for the Reorganization of the Provincial Courts in Ayuthia (1896–1897). Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 1998. Tregonning, K. G. “The Historical Background.” In Ooi Jin Bee and Chiang Hai Ding, eds., Modern Singapore, 14–19. Singapore: University of Singapore, 1969. ———, ed., Papers on Malayan History. From papers submitted to the First International Conference of Southeast Asian Historians, Singapore, January 1961. Journal of Southeast Asian History (1962): 40–72. Trocki, Carl A. Opium and Empire: Chinese Society in Colonial Singapore, 1800–1910. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. ———. Prince of Pirates: The Temenggongs and the Development of Johor and Singapore. 1784–1885. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1978. ———. Singapore: Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control. Oxford: Routledge, 2006.

bibliography

339

Turnbull, C. M. “Convicts in the Straits Settlements, 1826–1867.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JMBRAS) XLIII, pt.1 (1970): 87–103. ———. The Straits Settlements, 1826–67: Indian Presidency to Crown Colony. University of London Historical Studies no. 33. London: Athlone Press, 1972. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. New York: Aldine, 1969. Upton, Dell. “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth Century Virginia.” In Robert Blair St. George, ed., Material Life in America, 1600–1860, 357–369. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. Vaughan, J. D. “Notes on the Chinese of Pinang.” Journal of the Indian Archipelago (JIA) VIII (1854): 1–27. ———. “Notes on the Malays of Penang and Province Wellesley.” Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia (JIA), New Series 2, no. 2 (1857): 115–175. Wagner, Kim A. Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Wang Gungwu. “Migration and its Enemies.” In Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens, eds., Conceptualizing the Global City, 131–151. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994. Warren, James Francis. Ah Ku and Karayuki-San: Prostitution in Singapore, 1870–1940. Singapore and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ———. Rickshaw Coolie: A People’s History of Singapore, 1880–1940. East Asian Social Science Monographs, Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1986. Weber, Max. The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. London: Allen & Unwin, 1976. Widodo, Johannes. The Boat and the City. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Int., 2004. Williams, Raymond. Culture. London: Fontana, 1981. Wolf, Eric Robert. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Wright, Gwendolyn. The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Wynne, Mervyn Llewelyn. Triad and Tabut: A Survey of the Origin and Diffusion of Chinese and Mohamedan Secret Societies in the Malay Peninsula A.D. 1800–1935. Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1941. Yang, Anand. Bazaar India: Markets, Society and the Colonial State in Bihar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. ———. Crime and Criminality in British India. In Anand A. Yang ed., Monographs of the Association for Asian Studies, no. 42. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985. ———. “Disciplining ‘Natives’: Prisons and Prisoners in Early Nineteenth Century India.” South Asia, Journal of South Asian Studies (December 1987): 29–45. ———. “Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.” Journal of World History 14, no. 2 (2003): 179–208.

340

bibliography

Yeoh, Brenda. Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1996. Yousof, Ghulam-Sarwar. “Lasting Charisma.” Pulau Penang 1, no. 2 (1989): 32–35. Zinoman, Peter. The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam 1862–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. ———. “Colonial Prisons and Anti-Colonial Resistance in French Indochina: The Thai Nguyen Rebellion 1917.” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 1 (2000): 57–98. ———. “The History of the Modern Prison and the Case of Indochina.” In Vicente Rafael, ed. Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines and Colonial Vietnam, 152–174. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999. Unpublished Academic Papers and Theses

Casperz, Paul. “Plantation: Past, Contemporary and Future, Patterns.” Paper read at “‘Development from a People’s Perspective:’ Solidarity Action in Development,” seminar, Kandy, Sri Lanka, 16–23 November 1986. Chen Kuo-wei. “Becoming Company: A Study of the Chinese Kongsi as ‘regime of labour’ dwelling on its spaces of representation in nineteenth century Penang.” Thesis abstract, Taiwan University, College of Engineering, 2005. From http://www .cetd.com.tw/ec/thesisdetail.aspx?etdun=U0001-2207200523311100. Accessed 31 January 2008, translated from Chinese. Chua Beng Huat. “Fabricating Singapore: A Politics of Cultural Anxiety.” Paper presented at University of California, Berkeley, 1 April 2003. Chua, Olivia. “From Bras Basah to Changi, A History of Prisons in Pre-War Singapore.” Academic exercise, Department of History, National University of Singapore, 1990. Lai, Chee Kien. Chinatown #2. Image from card showing Sae Por and Toa Por, in Deriving Spaces: An Affiliate Exhibition of Nokia Singapore Art 2001, 30 November to 16 December. ———. “Commercial Interests and Multicultural Enclaves: The Establishment of Early Colonial Landscapes in Penang and Singapore.” 2002. Lim, Jon Sun Hock. “Colonial Architecture and Architects of Georgetown (Penang) and Singapore, Between 1786 and 1942.” PhD Thesis, School of Architecture, National University of Singapore, 1991, vol. I–V. Saw Chu-thong. “Transported Indian Convicts in Singapore, 1825–1873.” University of Malaya, 1956. Tanaka, M. “Hinduism in Singapore: A Case of Ethno-Nationalization.” Paper presented at the International Conference, Dynamics of Cultures and Systems in the Pacific Rim (Nara City), 29 February 2000. From http://www.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac .jp/~shakti/preSinga.html. Accessed 11 November 2007. Yang, Anand. “Con(vict) Tales from Bengkulen: Convict/Laborer/Slave in early Nineteenth Century South and Southeast Asia.” Unpublished paper at conference,

bibliography

341

Colonial Places, Convict Spaces: Penal Transportation in Global Context, c. 1600­– 1940, University of Leicester, December 1999. Electronic Sources

Amnesty International Report, ASA 36/001/2004. “Singapore, The Death Penalty: A Hidden Toll of Executions,” http://www.amnesty.org/en/alfresco_asset/ac5ac24e -a509-11dc-a92d-271514ed133d/asa360012004en.pdf. Accessed 31 January 2008. Anjum, Zafar. “Indians Roar in the Lion City.” Little India, 10 November 2007. www .littleindia.com/news/123/ARTICLE/1267/2005-11-12.html. Accessed 11 November 2007. Conditions of Work Permit for Employer of Construction Worker, Sec. 2, Employment of Foreign Manpower Employment Act Chapter 91A. http://www.mom .gov.sg/publish/etc/medialib/mom_library/work_pass/files.Par.8149.File.dat/ WP_S_Pass_Conditions.pdf. Accessed 11 December 2002. Balbindar Kaur Dhaliwal, “Gurdwara Sahib Silat Road (Silat Road Sikh Temple),” National Library Board, Singapore, Singapore Infopedia. http://infopedia.nl.sg/ articles/SIP_402_2004-12-14.html. Accessed 24 June 2008. Duncan, James and Nancy. Technologies of Biopower and Discipline in Nineteenth Century Ceylon Prisons. http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/ ceylonprisons/. Accessed 23 January 2008. Economic Research Institute. Human Resources Codes and Laws, Singapore, 2001. http://www.erieri.com/freedata/hrcodes/index.htm?singapore.htm. Accessed 11 November 2002. Immigration Laws: no. 21, December 1996. http://www.migrationint.com.au/news/ paris/dec_1996-21mn.html. Accessed 11 November 2002. Krishnan, Gauri Parimoo. Following Murukan: Tai Pucam in Singapore. Asian Civilizations Museum, Singapore. http://www.murugan.org/research/gauri_krishnan.htm. Accessed 12 November 2007. Migration News, Australia. http://www.migrationint.com.au/news/paris/dec_1996-21mn .html. Accessed 8 November 2002. Ministry of Manpower, Singapore, Construction 21. http://www.gov.sg/mom/fta/wp/ ftawp.htm. Accessed 10 January 2002. Ministry of Manpower, Singapore, “Overview of Work Passes.” http://www.mom.gov .sg/publish/momportal/en/communities/work_pass/overview_of_work_passes .html. Accessed 8 November 2007. Ministry of Manpower Speeches. http://www.gov.sg/mom/speech/speech99/ m991003.html. Accessed 10 January 2002. Ofori, George. “Foreign Construction Workers in Singapore.” International Labor Organization, Sectoral Activities. (http://www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/ sector/papers/forconst/forcon7.htm. Accessed 23 January 2008.

342

bibliography

One People One Nation One Singapore. Music by Jeremy Ian Monteiro, lyrics by Jim Atchison. Sung for National Day. Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts. http://www.mita.gov.sg/songs.htm. Accessed 10 December 2002. Poobalan. “Foreign workers outnumber Indian community.” BornInMalaysia, Indian, 13 August 2007. Based on an article in Berita Harian by Oleh Azrul Affandi Sobry. http://poobalan.com/blog/borninmalaysia/2007/08/13/foreign-workers-outnumberindian-community/. Accessed 11 November 2007. Sinapan Samidorai. “Singapore: 200 Indian Workers Protest at Indian Embassy.” 29 June 2004. http://www.thinkcentre.org/article.cfm?ArticleID=2402. Accessed 11 November 2007. Singapore Bank Note: Ron Wise’s World Paper Money Homepage. http://aes.iupui .edu/rwise/countries/singapore.html. Accessed 8 November 2002. Singapore Department of Statistics, May 2001. http://www.singstat.gov.sg/keystats/ c2000/handbook.pdf. Accessed 8 November 2002. Singapore Foreign Labor Trends, Trade Report, 1994–95. http://www.tradeport.org/ts/ countries/singapore/flt.html. Accessed 8 November 2002. Stuart, Robert (director). For the Term of His Natural Life. Minton Productions, Australia, 1985. “Theemithi Fire-walking.” Singapore Infopedia, National Library Board of Singapore. http://infopedia.nlb.gov.sg/articles/SIP_762_2004-12-23.html. Accessed 5 December 2007. Traffic Arrangements for Thaipusam Festival 2007, Media Release 28 January 2007. http://www.spf.gov.sg/mic/2007/070128_trafarr_thaipusam.htm. Accessed 16 November 2007.

I N DEX

Page numbers in boldface refer to illustrations. Abdul Rahman, Temenggong, 43, 45; Penang rioter, 151 Abdullah, Munshi, 45, 59, 61, 169, 170 Abu Lughod, J., 6 Adivasis, 62, 65, 144 Africa, 20–21, 24, 45, 65, 73, 97, 104, 106; Africans, 21, 104, 106, 166 Agra, 102, 142, 200, 245 Aguirre, C., 19, 20 Ahluwalia, M. L., 138 Algeria, 7, 21, 78, 103, 106; Algerians, 106 Allegasetty Reddy Swamy, 143 America, 5, 16, 64, 203; Americans, 6, 17–18, 20, 22, 23, 28, 64, 77, 84, 105, 142, 147, 215, 225, 238; American-Philippines, 105; Euro-American, 16–18, 77, 116; Latin America, 19, 78 Andamans, 19, 59, 65, 72–73, 78, 98, 128 Andaya, B., 39; B. and L. Andaya, 37 Anderson, C., 19, 20, 23, 64–65, 70, 74, 76, 153, 155 Anglo-Indians, 55–56, 83–84, 118– 119, 179, 210 Anjum, Z., 230 Appadurai, A., 46 Arabs, 28, 41, 53, 106, 175, 238, 245– 246; Arabia, 52; Arabians, 83, 166; Arab-Muslims, 106

architecture: colonial, 8, 31, 78, 122; community, 52–54, 159– 160; discipline of, 3–6, 20, 24, 28, 224; institutional, 50– 51, 116–187, 206–214, 222, 224–225; penal, 15, 22, 26, 70–73, 78–88, 108–116, 188, 202–206; residential, 54–56, 83, 226, 228; village, 41, 72 Arnold, D., 19, 20, 70, 85, 103, 106, 125, 143–144, 149, 200, 204 artisans, 25, 75, 112–113, 117, 152, 171; artificer, 76, 112, 114, 118, 242, 244 association: system of, xii, 17, 27, 63, 69–70, 75, 88, 90, 92, 108, 111, 142–145, 149, 155, 192, 201, 204, 215 attap, 31, 43, 46, 54, 67, 70, 72, 78, 83, 111, 114, 183 Australia, 5, 15, 18, 20, 22, 65–66, 70, 75, 96–98, 155, 217; Australians, 21–23, 28, 66, 75, 86, 155, 215, 225 Babcock, B., 189 Bakhtin, M. M., 3, 12–13, 157, 233; chronotope, 12, 157 Banda, Gongalegoda, 134 Bankoff, G., 22 Bawajee Rajaram, 114, 121–122, 213 Beccaria, C., 131 343

344

Bengal, 13, 52, 59, 92, 139, 147, 193; Bay of, 52; Bengalis, 28, 40–41, 83, 154, 165, 211, 233, 238; prisoners, classification of, 239, 240–241; prisons, prisoners, 59, 66–69, 96, 104, 143, 179, 204 Benkulen, 19, 43, 59, 64, 66, 96, 98, 132, 237 Bentham, J., 95 Bernault, F., 21, 73, 97, 104, 106 Berncastle, Dr. J., 56–57 Bhabha, H., 2–3 bhang, 57, 140 Bird, I., 56 Blundell, E. A. (governor), 141, 172– 173, 177, 179, 195, 237, 244 Blythe, W., 162, 169, 175 Bombay, 7, 39, 66, 114, 121, 147, 239, 240–242; Muharram, 165, 168 Bonham, G., 60, 237 Boria, 158, 166–170, 173, 182, 245 botanical gardens, 51, 243 boys, 74, 111, 119, 202 Bradell, R., 28 Braithwaite, J., 22, 155 Breckenridge, C., 2 bricks, xii, 31, 32, 101–102, 209, 243; brick making, 31, 102 bridges, 33, 98–99, 212; Juroo and Pry, 145 brothels, 56, 57; prostitutes, 54, 163, 171 Brown, I., 20, 73, 105, 153, 205 Bukit Larangan, 31, 34–35, 43. See also Fort Canning bungalows, 54–56, 72, 74, 83, 121, 209–210, 214, 219, 225

index

Burma, 15, 40, 52, 205; Arakan, 64–65, 102; Tenassarim, 64 Burmese, 28, 65–66, 83, 97, 114; prisons, 65–66, 78, 92, 97, 103, 105–106, 111, 205 Butterworth, 93, 145; Butterworth Hospital, 145 Butterworth, W. J., 119, 139, 176, 237 Calcutta, 36, 39, 43, 59, 64, 96, 116, 119, 139, 180 Cameron, J., 55, 57, 137 cantonments, 42, 50, 70, 79, 139, 177, 196–199 carnivals, 13, 157, 168, 187, 233– 234; carnivalesque, 13, 157– 158, 232–233 Carstens, S., 173 caste, 15, 17, 19, 25, 64, 69, 71, 77– 78, 86, 99, 104, 114, 129, 136, 153, 181; Brahmins, 133; caste Indians, 62, 144; diet, 76; in the Indian penal system, 62, 65, 76, 143–144, 156, 164; low caste, 143; riots, 144, 158, 200 Cavanagh, O., 237 Çelik, Z., 7 Ceylon, 24, 49, 109–110, 153, 165, 192, 204–205, 237; Colombo, 85, 133–134, 148, 153; Kandy, 85, 133, 136; Kandyan, 65, 114, 133–134, 136 Ceylonese, 136, 147–148, 150; female prisoner, 81; individual prisoners, 133, 136, 138, 144, 147–150; prisoners, 65–66, 102, 104, 106, 114; prisoners, classification of, 241; prisons, 84–85, 92

345

index

Chakrabarty, D., 3 Chatterjee, P., 67, 116 Chattopadhyay, S., 7 China, 41, 49, 52, 167, 169, 170– 172, 228, 247; China Street, 42, 161, 163, 183; China tile, 119; Chinatown, 159–160, 219, 238; emigration from China legalized, 38; prisons, 19, 21; South China Sea, 187, 195; trade with, 34 Chinese, 2, 9, 13, 29–31, 33–39, 58–60, 135, 138, 167–168, 211, 226–228, 231, 234; classification of, 238; community,

clothing, 19, 68–69, 75–77, 109– 110, 242 CMIO, 2, 29, 235 Code de l’Indigénat, 106 Coleman, G. D., 29, 43, 46–47, 66, 86–87, 118, 122, 209, 212, 239 Collingwood, C., 56 Collyer, Capt. G. C., 196–197 Comber, L. F., 169, 171 commercial square, 30, 43, 46, 49, 51, 99, 160, 224 cook houses, 81, 91, 93, 111, 126, 202 coolie, 23, 57–58, 151; coolies, 77,

36, 41–43, 118, 159, 162, 175; convicts, 65, 76, 83, 93, 108, 111, 114, 200–203; crime, 19; immigrants, 7, 38, 58, 156, 171, 173, 175, 195, 218; newspaper, 24; opium, 56–58; secret societies, 27, 57, 162–163, 169–176, 181–188, 190–192; settlement (town and village), 45–46, 49–50, 53–55, 99, 160, 214–215, 218–220; temples, 10 Chua, B. H., 9, 10, 11, 227 Chua, O., 23 chunam, 119, 243 church, 41, 50–51, 116, 118–122, 136, 141, 173, 201; Netley Abbey, 118; St. Andrew’s (church, cathedral), 31, 51, 118–119, 120; St. George’s, 116; St. Paul’s, 41, 70; Salisbury Cathedral, 119 Church, T., 239, 242, 244 Civic Centre, 219; civic center, 49, 121, 177

87, 101–102, 112, 118, 171, 173, 202, 243 corporal punishment, 15, 24–25, 62, 67, 70, 133, 137–138, 143, 217 courthouse, 50–51, 78, 118, 121– 122, 124; courts, 50, 106, 118, 121, 154–155, 169 Cowper, Asst. Sgt., 140 Crawford, J., 35, 119 criminology, 17, 20, 84, 85, 88 crown colony, 4, 188, 206, 216, 237 Dalits, 62, 144 Dato Koya shrine, 164–165 de Silva, K. M., 134 deaths, 76, 88, 91, 109, 122, 134, 139, 141, 143, 154, 183, 186, 217; cemeteries, 51, 100; death houses, 123; death rate, 126 debtors, 21, 68, 75, 79, 81, 83–84, 108 Deepavali, 233–234 Dent, H., 201, 206, 239

346

Desawarnana, 34 Devan, J., 224 Dhoraisingam, S., 23, 159 dialogic, 1, 3, 8, 11, 14, 34, 155, 157, 169, 187, 222; dialogical, 12– 13, 132; dialogically, 129, 216, 235; DialogiCity, 222; imagination, 12; landscapes, 13, 34; potential, 228, 233; practices, 234–235; spaces, 229, 233 diet, 69, 76–77, 88, 92, 106, 109, 125, 139, 202–204, 206; dietary, 76–77, 204 Dikotter, F., 19, 20, 62, 130 diseases, 19, 51, 68, 76, 87, 91–92, 118, 125–126, 136, 157, 191, 204–205, 241; beriberi, 204; cholera, 90–92, 123, 241; diseased, 123 Dobbs, S., 39–40 du Cane, E., 66, 87, 202 dual city, 1, 5–8, 39, 50, 60, 79, 174, 226 Duke of Edinburgh, 208 Dunuwille, 133, 138; Loku Banda, 133–134, 138; Tikiri Banda, 134–137, 141, 153 Dusserah, 165, 175, 233 Dutch, 28, 35, 39, 45, 50, 68, 160, 237; Dutch colonial, 40–42, 66, 102, 213 Dutton, M., 21 Earl, G., 56, 78 East India Company, 35, 36, 40, 42, 179, 180, 193, 237; convicts, 45, 59 Edwards, N., 11 Egypt, 15, 78, 103; Cairo, 21 Elangovan, 23

index

Enloe, C., 220 Eppagey Christiana, 81 escapes, 21, 70, 77, 112, 200–201, 239, 240; escaped, 200; escapees, 16, 24, 99 ethics, 96–97, 131 Eurasians, 33, 37, 41, 62, 74, 142, 150, 160, 219, 238 Evenson, N., 6 Evers, D., 11 exhibition, 96, 102, 170 Fanon, F., 6 Farquhar, W., 39, 43 Fincher, R., 5 Folch-Serra, M., 34 forts, 39, 70, 160, 193, 213; Canning, 33–34, 100, 160, 197, 208; Colombo, 133; Cornwallis, 42, 116, 139, 141, 193; Fullerton, 49, 193, 195, 197; William, 139, 244 Foucault, M., 1, 3, 6, 14–15, 130 Free Press (Singapore), 176–177, 181 French, 6, 19–22, 24, 28, 72, 103, 105–106, 145 French Algeria, 21 French church, 51 French Indochina, 78 Fruzetti, L. M., 168 Fujimoto, H., 166 Furnivall, J. S., 6, 8–10, 12, 36, 40, 59, 72, 97, 174 gambier, 39, 43, 46, 57, 172 gambling, 26, 145, 163, 171, 182; gambling houses, 56–57, 160, 175, 191 George IV, 42

347

index

George Town, 42, 71, 83, 160–162, 182–183 Ghee Hin, 163, 172–175, 181–183, 195 Glover, W., 7 Godley, M., 172 godowns, 49, 70 Goh, R., 5, 51, 119, 121, 224–226, 228, 231; dialogism, 3, 11; DialogiCity, 222 Gorman, A., 21, 145, 150, 199 Gothic (style), 31, 118, 119, 222; Cistercian, 118, 119 Government Hill, 50–51, 88, 195– 198, 208, 243 Government House: hinges, 149, 151–153, 152; Istana, 31, 214, 224; new building, 27, 31, 103, 190, 193, 196, 206, 208–214, 213, 224; old building, 42–43, 45, 50, 90, 116 government offices, 33, 50–51, 118, 122, 124 Gramsci, A., 1 Green, A. G., 134, 136, 144, 148, 153 Greenway, F., 22, 86 Grey, Major W. R., 206, 239 grid, 2, 7, 26–27, 30, 61, 83, 99, 101, 106, 128, 159–160, 188, 195, 199, 219; abstract, 189, 216, 226; fighting across, 174, 182–184, 187; urban, 42–43, 46–47, 52–55 Guangdong, 162; Kuantong, 167, 247 guardian figure, 31, 214 Hai San, 163, 172 Hakka, 163, 172

Hamilton, A. W., 167, 245 Hammapah, 100 health, 18, 90–93, 96, 109, 139– 140, 204–205, 245; healthcare, 146; healthy, 21, 68–69, 90, 92; and hygiene (sanitation), 88, 90–92, 116, 125, 191, 210 Hefner, R., 9–10 Henderson, E., 66 Heng, G., 224 Hikayat, 169. See also Abdullah Hindus, M. S., 20, 116 Hokkien, 54, 159, 160, 163, 172– 173, 175–176, 183 Holloway, H. R., 222 Hong Kong, 66, 93, 114, 240, 242 Horton, Sir R. W., 133 Hosagrahar, J., 7 hospitals, 75, 83, 90, 106, 111, 116, 125–126, 145, 206; asylums, 51, 83, 123, 145; General Hospital, 51, 118, 123, 125, 127, 141; pauper, 51, 78, 83, 123, 126; seamen’s, 123, 197 House of Commons, 180 House of Lords, 191 Housing Development Board (HDB), 225, 230 Huat, C. B., 9–11, 227 Hung, 169–171 Husain, 45, 165–166 Ignatief, M., 17 indentured plantation labor, 2, 23, 136, 155, 163, 189, 191–192, 215, 223 India: prisoners, 11, 65–66, 76, 97, 104, 108, 130, 144, 169; prison hospitals, 125; prisons,

348

19, 65–70, 84, 103, 106, 128, 143–145, 156, 164, 201 Indian Legislative Council, 192 Indian mutiny, 65, 75, 116, 141– 142, 179– 181, 195–197 Indians, 2, 36–38, 41, 43, 46, 50, 52, 54, 61–62, 65, 76, 83, 105– 106, 144, 160, 174–175, 186, 195, 203, 215, 218, 223; Anglo-Indians, 83; Chettiar, 160; Chetty, 38, 159; Chulias, 39, 54, 83, 163, 214; convicts, 1, 8, 19, 23, 28, 40, 70, 74, 118, 129, 144, 176–177, 202, 243; diaspora, 230–231, 233, 238; Hindustanis, 28; Muslim Indians, 163–166, 218; Parsees, 28, 41, 83, 238; Peranakan Indians, 37; Sikhs, 65, 138–141, 234; South Indians, 11, 40; Tamil, 11, 24, 28, 41, 106, 159–160, 185, 233, 243. See also klings institutions, 5, 7, 9, 19, 22, 27–28, 35, 78, 109, 118, 126, 128, 162, 190, 201, 224, 228, 231, 235; bourgeois, 14; colonial, 13–15, 17, 33, 50, 51, 188; cultural, 10, 164, 171–172, 174; democratic, 66–67; public, 31, 49, 83–84, 98, 116, 121–123, 206; religious, 10, 50, 218; republican, 20; total, 15, 20, 125 insurrection, 133, 179 Irschick, E., 11 Jacobs, J. M., 5 jails (acc. to types): Bridewell, 108; Cole’s Hotels, 111; commands, 70, 72–73, 83, 99, 102, 197, 200; Fresnes plan, 125; H. M.

index

Gaol, 109; House of Correction, 23, 81, 83, 87, 93, 108, 110–112, 180, 201–202, 205– 206, 243 jails (names): Agra, 84; Alipur, 65, 77; Allahabad, 84, 200, Balestier Road, 23, 110, 125, 202; Bandar Hilir, 22, 82; Bilibid, 78; Bras Basah, 60, 66, 86– 88, 89, 98–99, 104, 106, 113, 115, 176, 200–203; Burma, 105, 153, 205; Changi, 22–23, 215; Chapra, Bihar, 200; Chowrastra, 71, 84, 85; Darlinghurst, 86, 196; Hoa Lo, 22; Honoré, 84; Hyde Park Barracks, 86; Insein, 78; Iwahig, 105; Jaffna, 153; Jalandhur, 139; Kanara, 84; Lambese, 106; Paramatta, 86; Patna, 200; Pearl’s Hill, 22–23, 27, 79, 80, 87, 109, 190, 201, 206, 207, 208, 215; Port Blair, 59, 64, 192; Port Phillip, 86; Rangoon, 73, 78; Saigon, 78; Sydney, 86; Trincomalee, 85; Tura, 199; Welikada, 85, 134, 144, 148 Japanese, 23, 28, 41, 102, 215, 217 Java, 40, 52, 160–161, 210, 237; Javanese, 28, 34, 41, 54, 160, 174, 186, 238 Jebb, J., 66 jet junaza, 68 Johnston, N., 22 Johor, 39, 61, 193, 212, 228 Kahn, J., 219 Kampung Gelam, 53, 90, 159, 170, 186, 195–197, 218–219, 238; Kampung Glam, 159, 219

349

index

kangchu, 39 kapitans, 162 Kaplan, D. H., 222 Kedah, 42, 172, 174, 245–246 Kerbala, 165–166 Kerr, J., 86 Keyt, J. T., 147–152 Khoo Kay Kim, 10, 218 Khoo, S. Nasution, 24, 182 King, A. D., 6, 54, 116 king: of Burma, 65; of Cambodia, 102; of Kandy, 133; of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, 138; of Maharani Jindan, 138; Mogul emperor, 65; of Siam, 52, 137; William IV, 133 klings, 28, 30, 41, 160, 163–164, 173, 182, 233, 238 koli kallen, 167, 169 kongsis, 39, 50, 162–163, 172–174, 182–184, 195; kongsi houses, 53, 55, 58, 59, 160 Korff, R., 11 Kreta Ayer, 51, 53, 69, 159, 219 Kusno, A., 5 Kwa, C. G., 35 Lahore, 138–139, 245; Sarkar Khalsaji, 138 Lai, C. K., 28 Larut War, 172 law, 25, 50–53, 65, 116, 128, 131, 137, 139, 148, 172–173, 187, 206; civil, 150, 153, 154–156; colonial, 36, 38; contemporary, 232; courts, 118; excise, 191; Indian, 38; indigenous, 133; suits, 27 Lawrie’s Gazetteer, 137 Lee, P. P., 172

Lee, Y. K., 123 Light, F., 42, 50 Lim, Jon, 116, 119 literacy, 18, 130, 137, 152 Liu, G., 24 London, 187, 191, 211–212 machine, 102, 113; sawmill, 114 MacPherson, R., 118, 239, 244 Macquarie, Gov., 86 Madras, 119, 164, 195–196, 239– 241; convicts, 59, 66, 103, 114, 147, 192–193 magistrate, 68, 100, 136, 150 Mak, L. F., 58, 156, 162–163, 171– 172, 175 Malabar, 53, 65, 162, 165; Malayalees, 41 Malay, 33, 36–43, 53–55, 59, 65, 93, 108, 134, 154, 158–160, 167, 172, 200–201, 214, 218–221, 226, 228; census, 238, 247; chief, 36, 41, 172; community, 2, 30–31, 36, 163, 218; graveyard, 45; immigrants, 38; kampung, 41, 99, 210, 219; kings, 35; newspapers, 24; secret societies, 27, 174–175, 181–182 Malaysia, 2, 5, 8, 9, 24, 37, 185, 218, 220–221, 223, 225, 228, 231, 234 Man, Col. H., 66, 87, 135–137, 239, 242 market, 3, 8, 13, 41, 49, 51, 53, 114, 154, 176, 183, 232; Market Street, 53, 159, 160–161, 176, 183; marketization, 53; marketplace, 13, 36, 40, 221, 228 Markus, T., 22, 131 Marryat, F., 69

350

Marx, K. (Marxist, Marxism), 3, 4, 222 Masselos, J., 7, 165, 168 Mauritius, 19, 64, 72, 155, 165 Maxwell, J., 50, 122 McGee, T. G., 54 McNair, J. F. A., 23, 66, 190, 200, 238–239; commands, 72; deaths, 91; Government House, 208–210; manufacturing, 113–114; Pearl’s Hill Jail, 206; reform, 131, 137, 142; rules, 77; self-governing prison, 74, 96 Melaka, 23, 34–35, 44–45, 50, 56–57, 121, 126, 134, 188, 193, 201, 237–241, 243, 244–245, 246; festival riots, 158–161, 163, 173–174, 186; prison, 22, 59, 64, 66, 70, 79, 81–83, 85, 93, 98, 104, 114; settlement, 37, 39, 40–42; Tikiri Banda, 134–137 mental patients, 51, 69, 83, 88, 93, 123, 125–126, 129, 164 Merewether, E. M., 206, 239 messing, 19, 75, 77, 86, 200, 203 Metcalf, T., 6 Middle East, 20–21, 111, 145, 199 Mouat, F. J., 92, 96–97 Moule, H., 90 Mount Faber, 73, 195, 197 Muhammad, Prophet, 165–166 Muharram, 27, 158, 165–169, 174– 176, 233; convicts, 179, 181; Penang, 181–182, 185, 187 Muneeswaran, 234 municipality, 75, 100, 160; Land Office, 46, 75, 99, 122; Municipal Acts, 46

index

Murfett, M. H. et al., 34, 45, 193 Musa, M., 175 museum, 22, 30, 33, 35, 110, 170 Muslims, 62, 65, 69, 144, 167, 175; Arab-Muslims, 106; Indian Muslims, 162, 165, 219; Mohammedans, 52; Tamil Muslims, 160 muster, 75, 76, 88, 112, 113 Nagata, J., 8–10, 173, 220 Nalbantoglu, G., 5 Naning War, 72, 101 Narayanen, S., 50, 80, 89, 178 National Day, 227–228, 233 neoclassical, 45, 121 Nicholas, S., 18, 64, 75 Observer, 212 Ong, A., 38, 231 Ong, Teng Cheong, 214 opium, 26, 56–58, 163, 170–171, 175, 182; opium war, 195 Orang laut, 41, 43 Ord, Sir H. St George, 143, 208, 212, 237, 238 Orientalism, 1, 6, 224 Palladian, 78, 86, 121–122, 149 Panopticon, 14–17, 19, 63, 67, 79, 83, 95, 204, 213 Parekh, B., 224 Parliament House, 33, 214 Patten, A., 205 Pearl, Capt., 59 Pearl’s Hill, 195–199, 243; hospital, 123, 141 Penang, 24, 35, 37, 46, 56, 98, 154, 188, 193, 237–238, 246; classification of convicts, 240–241,

351

index

244; convict case, 145–146, 148, 151; courts, 50, 121; fort, 116; hospital, 126, 128; market, 53; petitions, 145; pottery, 119; prison, 22, 59, 64, 68–71, 71, 81, 83–86, 93, 104, 141, 147, 201; riots, 158–186; rules, 77; secret societies, 163, 167–169, 172–175, 181–186, 199; settlement, 40, 42–44; town hall, 54 Pengelley, 145–148, 150 pepper, 39, 49, 57, 172 Peranakan (Jawi Peranakan/JawiPekan), 23, 37, 41, 43, 163, 165–166, 175, 182, 219 Perera, N., 223 petitions, 27, 132–133, 137, 147– 148, 155, 180, 186, 199; petitioners, 145, 181 Philippines, 20, 40, 78, 105 photography, 24, 76, 114, 117, 206 Pieters, J. N., 224 Pilliai, N., 38 plural society, 2–3, 8–12, 27, 30, 33–34, 36–38, 40, 60, 159, 173–174, 189–190; postcolonial, 220–221, 226 police lockups, 68, 78; convict peons, 2, 72, 100, 101, 128, 181, 202; stations, 51, 100, 160, 181 Portugal, 64; Portuguese, 28, 34, 37, 41–42, 45, 51, 70, 74, 186, 193, 213 postcolonial, 1–3, 5–6, 8–10, 12, 14, 22, 27, 33; contemporary Singapore, 217, 219–224, 229 Prakash, V., 7 Prince of Wales Island, 42

Prinsep’s Hill, 190, 209 Province Wellesley, 42, 237 Public Works Department, 31, 59, 104, 147 Punjab, 138, 179 Queen Victoria, 147 Qu’ran, 166 Rabinow, P., 6, 116 race: and class politics, 1–6, 10, 12; institutions, 51–52; labor, 97–98, 104–106; penal policy, 17–18, 21, 25–28; plural society, 33, 36–37, 45, 49, 211, 217–218, 220–221, 223–224, 226–227, 230, 231; prisons, 63, 76–79, 80, 83, 92–93, 114, 123, 125, 128–129, 144– 145, 150, 153, 156, 162, 186, 203–205; urbanism, 14–17, 56, 60–61 race course, 51, 100, 215 Raffles, S., 33–35, 159, 193, 237; Lady Raffles, 72; memorial, 119; penal policy, 96–97, 104; Raffles Institution, 51, 209; Raffles Place, 121, 224; urban plan, 39–40, 43, 45, 51, 53, 59 rebellions, 65, 132, 138–139, 144, 200 Rajah, A., 227 Red Flag (society), 174–175, 181– 183, 185 religion, 36, 52–53, 57, 62, 69, 116, 133, 142, 144, 145, 153, 156–157, 164, 165, 185, 234; Buddhist, 134; Christians, 65, 69, 118– 119, 139–140, 142, 195–196, 238; Hindus, 52, 65, 69, 163,

352

165–166, 173, 175, 182, 234; religious, 9–10, 13, 27, 36, 50–52, 67–68, 76, 118–119, 122, 133, 138–140, 142–145, 156, 164–169, 175, 177, 179, 187–188, 214, 218, 226, 232– 235; Roman Catholics, 173. See also Shi`ia; Sunni residences, 46, 50–51, 53–54, 123, 225 Resident Councilor, 51, 109, 177, 239–240, 242, 244 riots, 19, 27, 72, 157–158, 173–174, 176, 178, 181–188, 184, 185, 195 roads, 133, 170, 181, 186, 196–197, 212; convict roadworks, 33, 60, 73–74, 98–100, 103, 109, 112, 123, 199, 221 Rothman, D., 20, 116 rules, 74, 77, 132, 201; committees, 105, 204; conferences, 204; penal code, 106; prison acts, 108, 191; regulations, 50, 52, 61, 68, 77, 126, 131, 149, 174 sadh sangat, 140 Sae Por, 159, 195, 214, 218 Said, E., 1, 3, 6 Saiyid, A. R., 168 Salman, M., 20–21 Salvatore, D., 19–20 samsengs, 162 Sandhu, K. S., 23 Sandy Point, 197 Sassen, S., 3 Saw, C. T., 23 Scott, J., 2, 38 Scriver, P., 7 secret societies, 27, 50, 53, 56–57, 158, 162–164, 169–172; hoeys,

index

50, 53, 169–170, 173; riots, 174–175, 181, 186–188, 192, 195 Sen, S., 19, 73, 128 separate system, 15, 17, 109, 201– 203, 206 sepoys, 38, 54, 72, 123, 164, 196, 243 Serajah Melayu, 34 Shelford, T., 111 Shergold, P., 18 Shields, R., 12–13 Shi`ia, 165–166, 175; Shi`ite, 165, 168–169 shophouses, 46, 51, 53–56, 58, 61, 219, 228, 230 Siam, 52; king of, 52, 137; Siamese, 28, 34, 102, 238; Thailand, 20, 228 Silat Road, Gurudwar, 141, 165 Singapore: defenses, 192–199, 194, 198; European town, 50–51, 56, 60–61, 86, 90, 100, 106, 116, 118, 164, 176, 186, 195, 206, 214, 218–219; Government House, 206–214; institutions, 116–126; opium, 56– 58; penal health and hygiene, 88–93; penal labor, 58–61, 98–104, 103; penal riots, 176– 179, 199–202; prison, 23–71, 83, 86–88, 93, 107, 108–109, 110, 110–116, 199–206; prison discipline, 74–78; public landscape, 50–54; residential life, 54–56; settlement, 34, 38–40, 43–45; town, 45, 104, 176–178, 190, 194–195; urban plan, 45–50, 214–215 Singapore stone, 35, 43

353

index

Singh, Khurruck, 139–141 Singh, Nihal, 138–141; Bhai Maharaj, 138, 165 Sinha, V., 233–234 sinkehs, 162 slaves, 16, 18, 21, 97, 140, 237; slavery, 6, 62, 64, 155, 218 Smith, A., 35, 95, 133 Somapah, 100 Spanish dollars, 43, 52, 111 Spencer, H., 96, 97 Sri Mariamman temple, 160, 164, 234 Stallybras, P., 157 Star, 211 Stevenson, Capt., 35, 239 Stirling, W., 170 Straits Settlements administration, 42, 45, 52, 60, 70, 126, 139, 156, 173, 180, 187, 193, 209, 237; colonial, 2, 11, 26, 35, 36, 57–59, 63–64, 101, 126, 131, 176 Straits Times, 73 streets, 159–169, 161 Stuart, W., 147, 149–153 Subaltern Studies, 1–3, 19, 23; subaltern, 12, 24, 130, 157–158, 173, 197, 231 Sultan Husain Shah, 41, 45, 52–53, 99 Sunni, 165–166, 168, 175 supreme court, 33, 81, 122, 148 surat sungai, 39 Survey Department, 46, 99 syabandars, 40 Syed Mustapha Idris, 165 taboot (tabut), 177, 180 Taiping rebellion, 195

Tan Tock Seng hospital, 51, 123, 126, 197 Tanjong Pagar, 159–160, 219 tattoos, 19, 68–70, 76 tazia, 166 Telok Ayer, 53, 159, 176, 186 Telok Belanga, 45 Temasek, 34–35, 43 Temenggong, 43, 45, 52, 60, 121, 193. See also Abdul Rahman Tengku Long, 45 Teo Chew, 172–173, 175–176 Teo, P. et al, 4 Thaipusam, 233–235 Thian Tai Huey, 170 Thompson, J. T., 46, 66, 99, 239 Thoms, D. P., 109 thuggee, 25, 69, 169 ticket of leave (TOL), 25, 75, 128, 146, 154, 191–192, 244 Times of India, 168 Tips, W. E. J., 20 Toa Por, 53, 159–160, 196 Tomby Alee (Thambi Ali), 165, 181 tong kongs, 176 transient workers, 221, 229–232, 235 transportation (penal), 77, 85–86, 138–139, 143–144, 151, 177, 180, 199, 201, 205, 215–216, 237, 239; end of, 190–192; history of, 16, 18–19, 21, 23– 27; of Indians, 59, 62, 64–65; Khurram, 69–70; murderers, 169; positive accounts of, 148–149; roll, 240, 245 Tregonning, K. G., 35 Trocki, C., 2, 11, 39, 57–58, 156, 171–172, 193 Tua Pek Kong, 172–175, 182–183, 186

354

Tulsie Ram, 145–146 Turnbull, C. M., 23, 35, 38, 50, 121, 154, 237 urban plan, 7, 26, 38–40, 43, 44, 47–48, 49, 59, 61, 162, 164, 169, 176, 189, 193, 220 Van der Veer, P., 2 Vansittart, H., 139 Vaughan, J. D., 166 verandah, 52, 55, 68, 79, 83, 125, 210–211 Victoria Adelaide Hassey, 142, 245 Victorian (style), 118, 210 Vietnam (Vietnamese), 19, 22, 41, 72, 105; Champa, 40; Hanoi, 13, 22; Indochina, 78, 105, 146; Sino-Vietnamese, 72, 105 Villa Emo, 209 Wade, M., 24 Wang Dayuan, 34 Warren, J., 2 Watson, Capt. A., 134 Wendt, G., 150, 152 White, A., 157 White Flag (society), 174–175, 181– 182, 185

index

Widodo, J., 11, 39 Williams, R., 95 Wolf, E., 2 women, 2, 41, 64, 79, 95, 100, 112, 142–143, 175, 215, 243; children, 74; classes, 102, 111; conflicts over, 163; end of transportation, 143; exemptions, 70–71; females, 25, 59, 66, 68, 74, 77, 83–84, 86–87, 125–126, 128, 142–143, 154, 168, 179, 192, 206, 229, 238–239, 241, 243–244; quarters, 81, 83, 85, 93; sentences, 74; tattooing, 70; wives, 25, 143, 203 Wong, T. C., 5 Woon, K. K., 10 World War II, 22–23, 85 Wright, G., 6 Wynne, M. L., 169 Yang, A., 19, 23, 25, 53, 200 Yeoh, B., 7, 52, 55, 90, 159, 187, 193 Yunan, 167, 246–247 Zinoman, P., 19, 72, 105, 146

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Anoma Pieris is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of “Imagining Modernity: The Architecture of Valentine Gunasekara (2007),” “JCY: The Architecture of Jones Coulter Young (2005),” and the coauthor (with Philip Goad) of “New Directions in Tropical Asian Architecture (2005).” She has degrees from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Production Notes for Pieris / Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes Cover design by Leslie Fitch Interior based on design by Leslie Fitch with display type in Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk and text in Scala Composition by University of Hawai‘i Press Production Staff Printing and binding by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Printed on 60# Glatfelter Offset B18, 420 ppi

southeast asia history During the nineteenth century, the colonial Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang, and Melaka were established as free ports of British trade in Southeast Asia and proved attractive to large numbers of regional migrants. Following the abolishment of slavery in 1833, the Straits government transported convicts from the East India Company’s Indian presidencies to the settlements as a source of inexpensive labor. The prison became the primary experimental site for the colonial plural society and convicts were graduated by race and the labor needed for urban construction. Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes investigates how a political system aimed at managing ethnic communities in the larger material context of the colonial urban project was first imagined and tested through the physical segregation of the colonial prison. It relates the story of a city, Singapore, and a contemporary city-state whose plural society has its origins in these historical divisions. A description of the evolution of the ideal plan for a plural city across the three settlements is followed by a detailed look at Singapore’s colonial prison. Chapters trace the prison’s development and its dissolution across the urban landscape through the penal labor system. The author demonstrates the way in which racial politics were inscribed spatially in the division of penal facilities and how the map of the city was reconfigured through convict labor. Later chapters describe penal resistance first through intimate stories of penal life and then through a discussion of organized resistance in festival riots. Eventually, the plural city ideal collapsed into the hegemonic urban form of the citadel, where a quite different military vision of the city became evident. Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes is a fascinating and thoroughly original study in urban history and the making of multiethnic society in Singapore. It will compel readers to rethink the ways in which colonial urban history, postcolonial urbanism, and governance have been theorized by scholars and represented by governments. Anoma Pieris is senior lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Australia.

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822-1888 Cover art: Coleman survey disturbed by tiger, 1831 (Grace Paramaspry, Jazminasianarts, Singapore) Cover design: Leslie Fitch Printed in U.S.A.

www.uhpress.hawaii.edu