It was late night on my first day in Singapore, and Shafeeq had given me a lot of friendly advises in order to avoid all possible disturbances to my aged host. Actually we cut short our interesting chats through memory lines only to help Abdullah Haji reach his room in time and get his sleep. But I was impatient and couldn’t really sleep over this ‘mine of information in front of me’. His initial answer ‘it is a great and long story’ to my question ‘how you reached Singapore from a North Kerala village’ suddenly washed off my sleepy mood. He also sat cross-legged on his string cot apparently happy to narrate me his story, and the history of Singapore, which I had tried to understand little bit through books and websites beforehand.
Abdullah Haji can be counted among the third group of Malayali Diaspora immigrated to Singapore. For Indians, especially Mallus and Tamils, it is easy to understand the origin of word Singapore, meaning the ‘City of Lion’ (Singam or Simham). A Malay legend is that a Sumatran prince spotted a lion while visiting the island of Temasek, and based on this good omen he founded a city there naming it ‘Singapura’.
The first group of migrants from South India is assumed to have reached in this Lion’s City when Sir Stamford Raffles, with the tacit support of Lord Hastings, Governor-General of India, established a trading station at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula in 1819, concluding a treaty with Temenggong Abdu'r Rahman and Sultan Hussein of Johor, who were in control of Singapore and who were compelled to let British consolidate their power in exchange for increased cash payments and pensions.
The trading station of Singapore was aimed at securing a safe and strategic base for the British Empire in the Straits in order to help expand its trade with China from its dominant bases in India. The British also established a trading post in Penang (1786) and captured Malacca from the Dutch (1795) in order to protect their merchant fleet in this region. Stamford transformed the sparsely populated, swampy island into a free-trade port and brought in unprecedented prosperity, attracting immigrants from nearby areas in large scale, especially from Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The layout of Central Singapore is still as Rafflews drew it.
In the second half of 19th century many of the immigrants reached as 'indentured servants', a term used for ‘laborers under contract to an employer for a fixed period of time, typically three to seven years, in exchange for their transportation, food, clothing, lodging and other necessities’. This kind of contracts was a boon and something like a safety valve to the growing number of poverty-stricken tenants of agricultural labourers of Malabar and Cochin because of the fast-deteriorating socio-economic conditions in those regions.
The immigration to the Sugar and coffee plantations of the region was essentially a south Indian phenomenon. Almost 90% of Indian migrant labour in the region was from Tamil Nadu since the main recruitment was based in Chennai, the erstwhile Madras. However, most of migrants from Malabar and the Coromandel Coast were non-labour migrants such as professionals, teachers, salesmen, peddlers, petty entrepreneurs, traders, shopkeepers and street vendors.
The third group of migrants reached after the tragic days Singapore experienced following ‘torturous’ Japanese occupation during the World War 2 in 1942, which brought the days of the Empire to an abrupt end. For three and a half years Singapore was under ‘cruel’ Japanese occupation, until the British Military Administration recaptured Singapore in 1945, leading to the dissolution of the Straits Settlements and making Singapore a Crown Colony in 1946.
During this period, the British had started providing a large number of work permit /employment pass, and many from Kerala arrived on this. Abdullah Haji, a young job-hunter, desperate in the extreme poverty and starvation at home and around, was one among those who secured a permit (it was nice to hear him pronounce the word permit in real Mappila style ‘permeett’) and boarded a not-that-much-safe launch sailing South East.
(photo: Me and Abdullah Haji at Singapore's famous Darga of Sayyid Habeeb Nuh, along with the Mausoleum caretaker. I will narrate the interesting story of Habeeb Nuh later)
He came as a rubber estate laborer in a Singapore that was totally different from today - Small huts scattered everywhere, two-storied buildings at some places, Arab, English, Bugis (an ethnic community from Sulawesi island of Indonesia) Chinese and Malay quarters and Kampongs (villages), small-scale peddlers and vendors doing most of the business all over the island, and a busy port. He changed from a laborer to a little tea vendor after Singapore attained full internal self-government in 1959, and an imposing authoritarian Lee Kwan Yew, who took the helm as prime minister, issued citizenship for all those stayed back during the crippling period, urging them to be part of the city-state’s struggle to survive and prosper on its own.
In 1961, Singapore's merger with Malaya as part of a larger federation was agreed between Malayan Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman and Singapore PM Lee Kuan Yew in view of closer political and economic co-operation between the Federation of Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, North Borneo and Brunei. After a short-lived merger, Singapore became a sovereign, democratic and independent nation on 9 August 1965. Though angry at the dominating Chinese people and culture and their sometimes arrogant ways, Abdullah Haji is in full praise of Lee Kwan Yew, an economic visionary, for developing Singapore into one of the cleanest, safest, and most economically prosperous cities in Asia.
Despite possessing the Singapore citizenship and its prestigious passport, which ensures hustle-free traveling to almost all rich countries in the world, Abdullah Haji never brought his family from Kerala to settle in Singapore, nor did he marry one in the adopted country as many migrants do. He visits his family or twice every year and keeps the nostalgic bond with his native place alive. He brought his family to Singapore only once last year to show them the pomp and splendor of the city-state. Now, as he has given out the tea-shop to run and leading a kind of retirement life, he gets more time with his family back home, and keeps traveling between Kerala and Singapore, a typical Malayali who has emotionally trapped between the love to his adopted world and the nostalgia to the birth place. Anyway, he wants the final sleep to inside the home soil.
While asked why he didn’t settle his family in Singapore, where they would have better education and employment opportunities, Abdullah Haji hinted at the darker sides of Singapore and acknowledged me why he was right in his decision. I remembered the words of Rajan Srinivasan I met on board Air India.Tuning his old radio for the 12am Tamil news locally broadcast, Abdullah Haji told me that I will realize why he kept the family safe back home. Before going to sleep he taught me a tip on how to deal with the bugs. Taking out a piece of sellotape, he showed me how the cellulose-based, pressure sensitive adhesive tape is effectively used to net the bug. He asked me to keep myself one piece near the pillow and use it whenever needed in the night.
Note: Reading about bug in the last part, close friend Hafiz Ismael called from Doha telling me the bug phenomena is not limited to Singapore, but it is found in Qatar and other GCC states as well, especially in the densely populated pravasi (migrant) quarters. His wife Taju first saw a bug from the Qatari metropolis. Migrates took away the bugs also with them, and left nothing of the species in Kerala.
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