2 - Chinatown Spelt ‘Singapur’

Summary

Despite its geographical location at the tip of Malaya, historical links with Britain and an overwhelming Chinese majority, Singapore ‘grew up in the image of Calcutta’. The Indian association was so strong that when Peter Chan Jer Hing was posted in the Singapore high commission in New Delhi in the early 1970s he received letters from simple Indians who spelt ‘Singapur’ like Kanpur, Udaipur or any other town in India. Indians have a sense of eternity but not history, says Lee's old associate, Natwar Singh, diplomat and politician, whose Kunwar prefix speaks of his lordly lineage. And so they looked beyond the recent connection to Suvarnabhumi which gave Singapore its name. The willing retention of the name was, in Rajaratnam's view, the ‘best tribute’ Chinese Singapore could ‘pay to India and her civilization’. He might have mentioned another Lion City (Simhapura), capital of the Hindu kingdom of Champa that flourished between the seventh and fifteenth centuries, now lost under a Catholic church in the provincial bustle of Tra Kieu in central Vietnam. Stranded in an Islamic sea after the tide of Indian culture receded from the Malayan peninsula, Singapore might also have been obliterated but for British rule followed by the Chinese energy and initiative that became the economy's driving force.

The British treated Singapore as a fragment of the Bengal Presidency, the human capital of thousands of Indians who went there under British aegis sustaining a sense of familiarity. A ‘wizened and white-haired’ ancient, who claimed to be 102 years old, the son of an early convict, proved Natwar Singh's point when David Marshall was threatening to resign as chief minister if Britain did not grant Singapore independence. The old man pleaded with him to stay on. ‘Indians built up Singapore and it belongs to Indians,’ he said. ‘As a descendant of our race, you should not resign!’ The emotional and excitable Marshall was not Indian though his folk ‘were an extension of the long-established Jewish community in Calcutta’.